Sativa seeds come 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 grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a «sativa-dominant» label taken as a statement 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 leans heavily to the classic end of the spectrum where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, since not one of them makes usable without the others.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out new bud clusters on top of old ones, producing towered, open buds rather than round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze lines, it is genetic and will happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends a month hunting a problem that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only slowing a slow plant even more. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the lineage generally does.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the one most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a «fourteen-week» sativa started with an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of the spread, because the other end moves less seed.
Sativa plants run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to whatever the pack states is seldom caught out.
Latitude
The one figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial lines need the run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the later the window stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical gardens are able to finish lines that northern gardens never will.
The practical rule for a seed pack: an «outdoor» sativa finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of it moves the finish back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a better season.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and something sharp that no other line quite reproduces.
In its looser sense «Haze» is any cross which carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says «Haze» without parents may be eighty percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never «is it a Haze» but «how much, and via which parent».
Sativa-dominant
The catalogue category rather than a measurable one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa by the breeder who drafted the description, and occasionally means no more than a certain the flowers are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other releases.
The experience people connect with the word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and by THC content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of «sativa-dominant» releases produce a flat couch result and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the opposite. To a grower the label is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Stretch
The burst of vertical growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few landrace types triple. The stretch continues three to five weeks and cannot be halted after it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the number to reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency to it; long-flowering plants show it more, and the reason is a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can trigger it going, and an old plant has already gone past its intended end frequently throws a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these means a sativa strain weak by course; it means the grower’s consistency matter for longer. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a week after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing on a sativa than on anything other category.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes plants out of regions where daylength hardly varies through the year, and that the plant never evolved a strong response to shortening days. Such lines often flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The working fix, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys a earlier decisive end. A listing that says «equatorial» is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that reads it as a note on geography misses the instruction hidden in it.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa lines and accounting for much of the thing growers mean as the «sativa» smell: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the heavier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning lines.
For a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing names terpinolene as the leading aromas, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.