Sativa seeds come with more jargon 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 seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over some generations, typically with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more, and the reason is a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and a old that has already gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final attempt to set seed.
None of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it makes the room’s consistency count over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a week later take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category rather than a botanical one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which occasionally means nothing more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy couch result and a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the opposite. To a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of the spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that is not there, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already long plant even more. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many classic sativa lines and accounting for much of the thing people mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by fast drying, and it fades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line most likely carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that decides whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. A closer south, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen plants that northern gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of it moves the finish later into the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better summer.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the number worth reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note sharp that no other line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross which carries some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
A Working Glossary for Sativa Seed Buyers
Sativa seeds come with more jargon 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 seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as reference, because it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since not one of them is usable on its own without the others.
Landrace
A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The mistake is treating a landrace like a modern hybrid. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over some generations, typically with light selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an collection point and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity to do; long-flowering plants express it more, and the reason is a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it off, and a old that has already gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few late pollen flowers on its own in a final attempt to set seed.
None of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it makes the room’s consistency count over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a week later take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Sativa-dominant
A marketing category rather than a botanical one. It generally means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which occasionally means nothing more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.
The effect people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and by THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy couch result and a good number of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the opposite. To a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the shorter end of the spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Sativa plants run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is a reasonable first step if you have a grower with a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing
The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, producing towered, open buds instead of round ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.
In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen under a flawless room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes a month hunting a fault that is not there, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already long plant even more. The listing rarely says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large amounts in many classic sativa lines and accounting for much of the thing people mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by fast drying, and it fades more quickly in the cure than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line most likely carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The single number that decides whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. A closer south, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and low-latitude gardens are able to ripen plants that northern gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of it moves the finish later into the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better summer.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues three to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is the number worth reading ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note sharp that no other line quite has.
In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever cross which carries some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
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