Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and something different again to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed sativa grow usually goes 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 statement of effect, a landrace chosen as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, since it leans strongly to the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.

Foxtailing

The tendency of certain flowers to grow new bud growth on top of existing ones, producing spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, typically from light that is too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.

In many sativas, especially Thai and some Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a problem that is there, dropping lights and heat and delaying an already slow flower further. The listing rarely warns which type you should expect; the parentage generally does.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by the local climate and growers together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas range widely than in any tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The trap is treating a landrace as a modern hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, including height no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength most growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally means a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a origin point and a reproduction history is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.

Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)

Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies across the year, and that the plant never develop a strong response to shortening days. Such lines often flower slowly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.

The practical response, handed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses a little yield and buys a earlier decisive end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin misses the point inside it.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, and the single most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a spread, since the longer end sells fewer seed.

Sativa lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is a reasonable first pass for a room with a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.

Haze

In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note metallic that no other line exactly has.

In its second sense “Haze” is any cross that contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents may be eighty percent original classic family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Intersex tendency

The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of tendency to it; sativa lines express it more often, and the reason is a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it off, and a old that has waited beyond its intended finish often produces a few desperate male flowers on its own in a final attempt to make seed.

None of this means a sativa strain unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the room’s discipline matter for a longer stretch. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is done and not two week later remove most of the risk. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for intersex traits is worth more on a sativa than for any else.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

A marketing category and not a measurable one. The phrase generally means that more of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and sometimes means nothing more than that the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s other lines.

The experience people associate with a word, lively instead of heavy, is driven far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy effect and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver exactly the reverse. For a grower the label is useful for a rough guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless without the terpene notes.

Stretch (the doubling)

The surge of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be stopped after it begins, merely redirected by training.

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

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A aromatic compound present in large amounts in a lot of old sativa strains and responsible for much of the thing growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off easily through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate most tent lines.

For a seed buyer the name does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain probably carries real Haze-era genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the you wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa to something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.