Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it runs strongly to the classic end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because none of them is usable without the others.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large proportion in many classic sativa lines and responsible for much of what people mean as a “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning lines.
To a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene line to something that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.
Foxtailing
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In most indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will occur in a flawless room. A new sativa grower often spends a month hunting a problem that is not there, lowering lights and heat only delaying a slow flower further. The breeder rarely says which kind to expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Equatorial
Refers to lines from latitudes where daylength barely changes through the year, and that the plant never develop a sharp reaction to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working response, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains a earlier decisive end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on geography has missed the point hidden in it.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and cannot be stopped after it begins, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch figure is the fact worth reading before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica stock almost always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency for it; long-flowering plants express it more often, for one simple reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can trigger it going, and a old that has waited past its natural finish often produces a few desperate male flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these means a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the room’s consistency count for longer. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not a week after take away most of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a sativa than for anything else.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misread number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of a spread, because the longer end sells less seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom disappointed.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa by the breeder who drafted the listing, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other releases.
The experience people connect with a word, lively rather than sedating, is driven more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch effect and a good number of the opposite lines do the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is worth something for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Haze
Originally a particular line of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no other other line quite reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which carries some of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents may be eighty percent original classic family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack states. Long-flowering lines require the autumn days to continue late enough for the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. The further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal and subtropical growers are able to finish lines that northern gardens never will.
The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of that moves the finish later towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better summer.