Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, because it leans strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of some flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, typically from light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow plant further. The listing rarely warns which kind to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, and occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy couch result while plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is useful as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to worthless without the aroma description.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped through centuries to one region by local climate and climate alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a modern product. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, including height no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, typically with light selection for tent life; it is closer to manageable but still not uniform. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line has a degree of tendency for it; long-flowering lines express it more often, for a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and a old plant has gone beyond its natural end frequently throws a few late pollen sacs on its own in a final effort to set seed.
Not one of these means a sativa line unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the grower’s consistency matter over a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not two week later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that states a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch figure is a number worth reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Equatorial
Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant never develop a strong reaction to shortening days. Such lines frequently flower slowly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys an more decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin misses the instruction hidden in it.
Latitude
The single figure that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering lines require a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; at northern latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A further south, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and subtropical gardens are able to finish plants that temperate gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of it pushes the date later towards the weather. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a longer summer.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of the range, because the other end sells less seed.
Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first pass if you have a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of spice, pine and something sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross that carries a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” without lineage could be eighty percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.