Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a «sativa-dominant» label read as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since none of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Intersex tendency
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has some tendency for it; long-flowering lines express it more often, for one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and an plant that has gone beyond its natural finish frequently produces a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
None of these makes a sativa line weak as a matter of nature; it means the room’s consistency count for a longer stretch. Light-tight room, stable temperatures and cutting when the plant is done rather than a week after remove most of the problem. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the number to read ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene (the «sativa smell»)
A terpene found in high proportion in many classic sativa lines and responsible for most of what growers describe as the «sativa» smell: green, woody, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, driven off easily through hot drying, and it fades faster during storage than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word does two things. When a listing names terpinolene among the lead aromas, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And where the you wants that smell to survive to the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line to a flower that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack promised.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means that the plant never evolved a strong reaction to changing days. Such lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains a more clearer finish. A listing that says «equatorial» is telling you this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere geography misses the point inside it.
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category and not a botanical one. It generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa by whoever drafted the description, and occasionally means no more than that the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s other releases.
The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» hybrids produce a flat sleepy effect while a good number of the opposite stock deliver the reverse. To a grower the percentage is worth something as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.
Haze
In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no line quite has.
In its looser sense «Haze» is whatever cross that contains a share of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that says «Haze» without parents could be mostly percent the classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing towered, open buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress response, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks chasing a problem that is not a problem, lowering lights and heat only slowing an already long flower even more. The listing rarely warns which type to expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by local growers and growers alike, and not by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range widely than a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings traits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. «Heirloom» on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with light selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop offering «landrace» that does not give a origin region and a generation count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For 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 a eight-week vegetative period 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 run 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 flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is a reasonable first pass for a room on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.