Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and most of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The disappointing sativa grow nearly always 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 description of effect, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, since it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, because none of them is sense without the others.

Foxtailing

The habit of certain flowers to grow fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.

In a good number of sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen in a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a problem that is there, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow plant even more. The listing seldom says which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.

Sativa-dominant

The catalogue category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the description, which occasionally means no more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s other lines.

The experience people connect with a word, lively rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a flat sleepy effect while plenty of the opposite stock deliver the opposite. To a grower the percentage is useful as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is close to useless without the terpene description.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular place by local growers and climate together, and not by deliberate selection. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, not a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread widely than a tent-bred line, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The mistake is buying a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings traits that make sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection towards indoor conditions; it is closer to manageable but still far from a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation history is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be judged accordingly.

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 a degree of tendency for it; sativa plants express it more, and the reason is a simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it going, and an old plant has gone past its natural end often throws a few late male sacs on its own in a last attempt to set seed.

None of this makes a sativa strain unstable as a matter of course; it makes the room’s consistency count for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is done rather than a week later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more on a long-flowering line than for any other category.

Equatorial

Describes plants from latitudes where daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant does not develop a strong reaction to shortening days. These plants often flower reluctantly under a standard twelve-hour schedule, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.

The working fix, handed around between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It costs some little yield and buys an earlier decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography has missed the point hidden in it.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

Originally a specific line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, takes for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something sharp that no other line exactly has.

In its second sense “Haze” is any cross that contains some of that family, which today is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” without parents may be mostly percent original classic family or one small fraction of it, and the flowering character tracks the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound present in high proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers describe as a “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off easily by hot drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in the cure than the heavier terpenes that dominate most tent stock.

For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably carries substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the you wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure is going to be cool and cool; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to a flower that tastes of very little and leaves no trace of what the pack described.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The single number that decides whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants require a run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; in northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests an half-finished plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal and low-latitude growers can finish lines that northern gardens cannot.

The usable reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa finishing month is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each degree further north of that pushes the date back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.

Stretch

The burst of vertical growth which follows the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and a few equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be halted once it has started, only bent sideways by training.

In tent terms, the stretch figure is a number to reading ahead of choosing when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres in a standard tent is touching the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. People coming from indica stock almost always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.