Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as the concrete examples, since it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since none of them makes sense on its own without the others.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of the range, because the other end moves less seed.
Sativa lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large amounts in many classic sativa strains and accounting for much of the thing people describe as the “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly sweet all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by hot drying, and it fades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And when the grower wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial lines go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and will not be stopped after it has started, merely bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a fact to read before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross which carries some of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular place by local growers and growers alike, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over a number of generations, typically with light selection for tent life; it is closer to usable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of existing ones, giving towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks hunting a problem that is not there, lowering lights and heat and slowing an already slow flower further. The listing rarely warns which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing term and not a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The experience people connect with the word, lively rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver the opposite. To a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that determines whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants require a run of shortening days to continue long enough to let the plant to ripen; in northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A further south, in the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal or subtropical growers can ripen plants that temperate gardens never will.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere in temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the finish later towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better season.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from latitudes in which daylength barely changes through the year, which means that the plant never evolved a sharp response to shortening days. Such lines often start flowering slowly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working fix, passed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and buys an earlier clearer end. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.