Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a description of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense without the others.

Sativa-dominant

The marketing term and not a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa by the breeder who drafted the description, and occasionally means nothing more than that the buds are airier or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other lines.

The experience people associate with a word, lively rather than sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of the opposite stock do exactly the opposite. For a buyer the percentage is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is close to useless without the terpene description.

Equatorial

Describes lines out of regions in which daylength hardly varies through the year, and where the plant never evolved a strong response to changing days. These plants often start flowering reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day rather than a signal.

The working response, passed down among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains a earlier decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is warning you about this in one word, and a grower that takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.

Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)

The habit of some flowers to push out fresh calyx growth on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds rather than round ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, typically from light too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.

In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and will occur in a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month hunting a fault that was never not there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying a long flower even more. The listing rarely warns which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped through generations to one region by local growers and climate together, rather than by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range far more than a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the point of growing one.

The mistake is buying a landrace like a finished product. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still not uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a generation history is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency to do; sativa plants show it more, and the reason is one plain reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it going, and an plant plant has gone past its natural end often produces a few late pollen sacs on its own in a final effort to make seed.

Not one of these means a sativa line unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the room’s discipline matter for longer. A sealed room, stable temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not two week after remove most of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is saying something worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for any else.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misread number 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 a eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the shorter end of a spread, since the other end sells less seed.

Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that figure, which is the reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely disappointed.

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A terpene found in large proportion in many old sativa strains and responsible for most of the thing people mean as a “sativa” smell: green, woody, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene fades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.

For a seed buyer the word does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries real Haze-era genetics whatever the percentage says. And where the you are after that profile to survive by the jar, the drying has to be cool and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one number that decides whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Long-flowering plants require the run of shortening days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a half-finished plant in late October or else loses it to mould in November. A further south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal or low-latitude growers can finish plants that northern gardens cannot.

The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step north of that pushes the finish back into the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer summer.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

Originally a specific family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note sharp that no other other line exactly has.

In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which contains some of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which says “Haze” without lineage may be mostly percent the classic family or a small fraction 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”.