Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it leans strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no special order, because none of them is usable on its own without the rest.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular place by the local climate and growers together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and smells range far more than in any tent-bred hybrid, and that variation is the point of keeping one.

The mistake is treating a landrace as a modern hybrid. It brings habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm set to an daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for a number of generations, often with light selection towards indoor life; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless not uniform. A shop offering “landrace” without a collection region and a generation count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.

Intersex tendency

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has some tendency to do; long-flowering plants show it more often, for a plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering that can trigger it going, and an plant plant has already waited beyond its natural finish frequently throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a last effort to set seed.

None of this means a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the room’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than a weeks later take away most of the problem. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing for a sativa than for any other category.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The single number that decides if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Long-flowering plants require a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. The further south, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean and subtropical gardens can ripen plants that northern growers never will.

The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually somewhere in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step north of that pushes the date back towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.

Stretch

The burst of vertical growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial types triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and cannot be halted once it has started, merely redirected by training.

In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is a number to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.

Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)

Refers to plants out of latitudes where daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant does not develop a strong response to changing days. These plants often start flowering slowly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.

The working response, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys an more clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin has missed the point hidden in it.

Foxtailing

The habit of certain flowers to grow new bud clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, irregular buds instead of dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred strains it is a heat response, usually caused by light too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.

In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to occur in a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that is not there, lowering lights and heat only slowing a slow plant further. The listing rarely warns which kind to expect; the parentage usually does.

Flowering time

The number of weeks from the onset 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 is cut to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of a spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.

Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is a sensible first pass for a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is seldom disappointed.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and something sharp that no line exactly has.

In its second sense “Haze” is whatever cross that contains some of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the grow character follows the share, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many classic sativa lines and accounting for most of the thing growers describe as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, lemon and faintly sweet at once. It is volatile, driven off quickly through fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate indica-leaning stock.

To a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain most likely carries real old-sativa ancestry whatever the label claims. And when the grower are after that profile to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack described.