Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says 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. A failed sativa grow nearly always goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, since not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.
Equatorial
Describes plants from latitudes in which daylength barely varies across the year, and that the plant does not evolved a strong response to changing days. Such plants frequently start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a earlier clearer end. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography misses the point inside it.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note metallic that no other line quite has.
In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains a share of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which reads “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth that comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues two to five weeks and will not be stopped once it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, the stretch figure is the number to reading before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always switch far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Intersex tendency
The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis population has a degree of tendency for it; sativa plants show it more often, for one plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and an old that has gone beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to make seed.
Not one of these makes a sativa line unstable by course; it means the room’s discipline matter over a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable temperatures and cutting when the plant is done rather than two weeks later take away most of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a sativa than on any other category.
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular region by local climate and climate alike, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this variation is the point of growing one.
The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings habits that made sense in an open field, such as a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, often with light selection for indoor conditions; it is nearer to usable but nonetheless far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.
Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)
A aromatic compound found in large amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing people describe as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, woody, lemon and slightly sweet at once. It is fragile, driven off easily through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent stock.
For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the line probably has real old-sativa genetics regardless of what the percentage says. And where the grower are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that smells of hay and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally quote the shorter end of a spread, since the other end moves less seed.
Long-flowering plants run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is rarely caught out.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to grow fresh bud clusters on top of existing ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a stress response, typically caused by light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is built in and will occur in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a problem that is there, dropping lights and temperatures only slowing an already long flower further. The breeder rarely warns which type you should expect; the lineage usually tells you.
Latitude
The one figure that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require the run of shortening days to continue long enough for the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or else loses it to mould in November. A closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers are able to ripen plants that northern gardens never will.
The usable reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step north of it pushes the finish back towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better season.