Sativa Seeds, Term by Term

Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it means one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, because none of them is sense without the rest.

Sativa-dominant

The marketing category rather than a measurable one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by whoever wrote the description, and sometimes means no more than that the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver the opposite. For a grower the percentage is worth something as a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.

Haze

Originally a specific line of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no line exactly has.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any cross which contains a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the classic family or one small fraction of it, and the grow character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Foxtailing

The habit of some flowers to push out fresh bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, irregular buds instead of round ones. In most indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, typically from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.

In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen in a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks chasing a fault that is not a problem, lowering lights and heat and delaying a slow flower even more. The breeder rarely says which type to expect; the lineage usually tells you.

Equatorial

Refers to plants from regions in which daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant does not evolved a strong response to shortening days. These plants often flower reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.

The working response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an more decisive finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere origin misses the instruction hidden in it.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular region by the local climate and growers alike, and not by modern selection. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, flowering times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of keeping one.

The trap is treating a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to a daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but still not a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” without an collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced with that in mind.

Latitude

The one figure that determines if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need a run of shortening days to continue long enough for the plant to ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean and subtropical growers are able to ripen plants that temperate growers cannot.

The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point within southern Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of that moves the finish later into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a long-flowering sativa outdoors is looking for an autoflower or a covered space, not a longer summer.

Terpinolene

A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for most of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily through fast drying, and it fades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.

For a seed buyer the word does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead terpene, the line probably carries real old-sativa ancestry whatever the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that profile to survive by the jar, the drying is going to be cool and cool; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, which is the single most misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of the range, because the other end moves fewer seed.

Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is a sensible first step for a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is seldom caught out.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity to it; sativa lines express it more often, for one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it off, and an old plant has already gone past its intended finish frequently throws a few desperate pollen flowers on its own as a last effort to make seed.

Not one of these means a sativa line unstable as a matter of course; it makes the grower’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done and not a week after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something more for a sativa than on anything else.

Stretch

The burst of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch continues three to five weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, merely bent sideways by training.

In tent terms, the stretch multiplier is the number worth read before choosing when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres 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 consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.