Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, because it leans strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, because none of them makes usable on its own without the rest.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by local climate and growers together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a modern product. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to a daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is nearer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” without an origin region and a generation history is using the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is the one most misread number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the shorter end of a range, since the other end sells less seed.
Sativa plants run anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Equatorial
Describes plants from regions where daylength hardly varies across the year, and where the plant never develop a strong response to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day and not a signal.
The practical response, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It loses a little yield and buys a earlier decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin misses the point inside it.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as a “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly sweet at once. It is fragile, driven off easily by fast drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing names terpinolene among the lead terpene, the line probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that profile to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be slow and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.
Intersex tendency
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Every cannabis line carries some tendency for it; long-flowering lines express it more, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and a old that has waited beyond its intended end frequently produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final effort to make seed.
Not one of this means a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the grower’s consistency count over a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, stable conditions and cutting when the plant is ready rather than a weeks later take away most of the risk. A listing that mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on anything else.
Haze
In its first sense a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai landraces, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, pine and a note metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that carries a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It usually indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by whoever wrote the listing, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the flowers are longer or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with the word, lively rather than heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat couch effect and plenty of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. For a buyer the label is useful as a rough guide 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.
Stretch
The burst of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half their height again; sativas routinely double, and a few equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and will not be halted once it begins, only redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the fact worth read before choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one number that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack prints. Equatorial lines need a run of shortening days to continue late enough to let the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. The further south, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude growers are able to ripen plants that northern gardens cannot.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree north of it pushes the finish back towards the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors is looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a better summer.