Reading Sativa Seed Packs: The Glossary
Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the person standing in front of the listing. A 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 fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description 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 open for reference, because it runs heavily to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them is sense on its own without the rest.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The tendency of certain flowers to push out new bud growth on top of old ones, producing towered, open buds rather than round ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, typically caused by light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the cause.
In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and will occur under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month chasing a problem that was never there, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom warns which type you should expect; the lineage generally tells you.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has some capacity to do; sativa plants show it more, for one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it going, and a plant plant has already waited beyond its natural finish often produces a few late pollen flowers on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
None of these means a sativa strain weak as a matter of course; it means the grower’s discipline count over a longer stretch. Light-tight room, steady conditions and harvesting the moment the plant is done rather than two week later take away most of the risk. A listing that states a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a sativa than on any else.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be mostly percent original classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local growers and climate alike, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a single plant: inside a pack the heights, flowering times and smells range far more than any tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, including height no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to an equatorial daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to usable but still far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give a collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.
Latitude (outdoor sativas)
The one figure that determines if a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial lines require the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant to finish; at northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. A further south, in a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and subtropical growers can ripen plants that temperate gardens never will.
The practical reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest date is stated for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it pushes the finish back towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Sativa-dominant (the label)
The catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage were described as sativa according to whoever drafted the listing, which occasionally signals nothing more than a certain the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s other lines.
The experience people connect with a word, clear-headed rather than heavy, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by THC content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy couch effect and a good number of the opposite stock do exactly the opposite. To a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene notes.
Stretch
The surge of vertical growth that comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be stopped once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact to read ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres inside a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock nearly always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Flowering time (and what it is counted from)
The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders also give the optimistic end of a range, since the longer end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines take 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 a reasonable first pass for a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.
Equatorial
Describes plants out of latitudes in which daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant does not evolved a strong response to changing days. Such lines often flower reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.
The working fix, handed down between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs a little yield and buys an earlier clearer end. A listing which says “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin misses the point inside it.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound present in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of what growers mean as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly sweet all at once. It is fragile, lost easily by hot drying, and it degrades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.
To a seed buyer the name does two things. When a listing lists terpinolene as the leading aromas, the strain most likely carries real old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the you are after that profile to survive by the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast dry flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.