A Working Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers
Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, since it runs heavily to the classic end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since none of them makes sense without the rest.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with an eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the shorter end of the spread, because the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the sensible first pass for a room on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is rarely disappointed.
Equatorial
Describes plants out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies through the year, which means where the plant does not develop a sharp response to shortening days. These lines frequently flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The practical response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It costs a little yield and buys a more clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by local growers and climate together, rather than by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of keeping one.
The trap is buying a landrace like a modern product. It brings habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength most growers never offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is closer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give an collection region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Terpinolene
A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of old sativa lines and responsible for much of the thing growers describe as a “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, lost easily through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two things. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the you wants that smell to survive to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch
The surge of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the fact to reading ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which occasionally means no more than that the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s other releases.
The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy couch effect while a good number of indica-labelled lines deliver the opposite. To a buyer the percentage is worth something for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is next to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Latitude
The single figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require the run of shortening days to go on long enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else loses it to mould in November. The further south, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and Mediterranean or low-latitude growers can ripen plants that northern growers never will.
The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that moves the date later towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, not a longer season.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to grow new calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a heat response, usually caused by light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, especially Thai and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a problem that is not there, dropping lights and temperatures and slowing a long flower further. The listing seldom says which type to expect; the parentage generally does.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a particular line of plants bred in coastal California from Colombian, Thai and Thai landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something metallic that no other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which contains a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.