Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» tag read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it runs heavily towards the classic end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, because none of them is usable on its own without the rest.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a «fourteen-week» sativa grown after an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of the spread, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is a sensible first step for a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack states is seldom caught out.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population has some capacity for do; sativa plants express it more, and the reason is a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can set it going, and a old that has already gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate pollen sacs on its own in a last attempt to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa strain weak by nature; it means the room’s consistency count for longer. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a weeks after take away most of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing for a sativa than for any else.
Latitude
The one number that determines whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to continue late enough for the plant finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or else loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean and subtropical gardens are able to finish lines that northern gardens cannot.
The practical reading of a seed listing: an «outdoor» line harvest date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every degree north of it pushes the finish back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.
Equatorial
Describes plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely changes through the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp reaction to shortening days. Such lines frequently flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, handed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It loses some little yield and gains a more decisive finish. A listing which says «equatorial» is warning you about this with one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on geography misses the point hidden in it.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing growers describe as a «sativa» aroma: green, woody, lemon and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and it degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the word earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading terpene, the line probably has substantial Haze-era ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the you are after that profile to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene line into something that tastes of hay and no trace of what the pack described.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be halted after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is the fact to read before choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
A marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever wrote the description, which occasionally means nothing more than a certain the flowers are longer or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by THC balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of «sativa-dominant» releases deliver a heavy sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled lines do the opposite. For a grower the label is worth something for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is close to worthless without the terpene description.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over centuries to one region by local growers and climate together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread far more than in any tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.
The trap is treating a landrace like a finished product. It brings traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. «Heirloom» on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for a number of generations, typically with light selection for indoor conditions; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop listing «landrace» that does not give a collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.
Haze
Originally a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense «Haze» is whatever hybrid which contains some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says «Haze» and gives no lineage may be eighty percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».