Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached 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 trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label 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 for reference, because it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, because not one of them is sense without the others.
Latitude
The single number that decides whether a sativa will finish outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the window stretches, and coastal and subtropical growers are able to ripen lines that northern growers cannot.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of it pushes the finish later towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for an autoflower or a covered space, and not a better summer.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing term and not a botanical one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid balance than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a flat sleepy effect and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver the reverse. To a grower the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless unless accompanied by the terpene description.
Flowering time
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, which is the single most misread number on a sativa pack. With 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 stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a spread, because the longer end moves less seed.
Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the reasonable first pass for a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one place by local growers and growers together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range far more than in any tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to an daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” without a collection region and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines go further. The stretch continues three to five weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only redirected by training.
In practical terms, the stretch multiplier is a fact to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock nearly always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to grow new calyx growth on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.
In many sativas, above all Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying a long plant even more. The breeder seldom warns which kind to expect; the parentage usually does.
Haze
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and South Indian parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original old family or one small fraction of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Refers to lines out of regions where daylength hardly changes through the year, and that the plant does not develop a sharp response to changing days. These plants frequently flower slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses a little yield and gains a more clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower who reads it as a note on geography misses the point hidden in it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of tendency to do; long-flowering plants express it more often, for a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and a old that has gone past its intended end frequently produces a few desperate pollen flowers on its own in a last attempt to set seed.
Not one of this makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the room’s discipline count over longer. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is done and not a week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any else.
