Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it runs heavily towards the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is sense without the rest.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A terpene found in large proportion in many classic sativa strains and responsible for much of the thing people mean as a “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line probably carries real old-sativa ancestry whatever the label says. And where the you are after that smell to still be there by the jar, the drying has to be cool and cool; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene line to something that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis line carries some capacity for do; sativa plants express it more, for one plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it going, and a plant that has gone past its intended end often throws a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last attempt to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line weak as a matter of nature; it makes the room’s discipline count over longer. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a week later remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a long-flowering line than for anything other category.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, usually caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and will happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that was never not a problem, lowering lights and heat and delaying an already slow plant even more. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage usually does.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single figure that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack prints. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The closer to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree north of it pushes the date later towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors is shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better season.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also give the shorter end of the spread, because the longer end moves less seed.
Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is rarely caught out.
Haze
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and something metallic that no line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross which carries some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the classic family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from regions in which daylength barely changes through the year, and that the plant never evolved a sharp response to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical fix, handed down among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction inside it.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local climate and growers together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread widely than in a tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is closer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue term and not a botanical one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and occasionally signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The experience people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy result and plenty of the opposite stock do the reverse. To a buyer the label is worth something for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.