Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. A disappointing sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken as a promise, a "sativa-dominant" tag taken as a statement of character, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open as the concrete examples, because it runs strongly towards the classic end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, because not one of them is usable without the others.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a "fourteen-week" sativa started with an eight-week vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of a spread, because the other end moves fewer seed.
Sativa lines run everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.
Haze
Originally a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and then preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.
In its looser sense "Haze" is any hybrid which contains some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says "Haze" without parents could be eighty percent original classic family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering character follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never "is it a Haze" but "how much, and through which parent".
Landrace versus heirloom
A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular place by the local climate and growers together, and not by deliberate breeding. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range widely than any tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.
The trap is treating a landrace as a finished hybrid. It brings traits that make sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to a daylength most growers never offer. "Heirloom" in a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is nearer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A seller offering "landrace" without a origin region and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.
Latitude
The single figure that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to continue long enough to let the plant to finish; at high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts an unripe plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. The closer south, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that northern gardens cannot.
The practical reading for a seed listing: an "outdoor" line harvest month is given for the breeder's home latitude, normally a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and every step north of it pushes the date back towards the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or else a greenhouse, not a longer season.
Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)
The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat symptom, usually from light that is too close or a room that is too high, and the advice is to fix the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month chasing a fault that is a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying a slow flower even more. The breeder rarely says which kind you should expect; the parentage generally tells you.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue term and not a botanical one. It generally means that more of a hybrid's lineage are described as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, and occasionally means no more than that the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder's other lines.
The experience people connect with a word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than it is by ancestry, and a good number of "sativa-dominant" releases deliver a heavy sleepy effect and plenty of the opposite lines do the reverse. To a grower the label is useful as a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to useless without the aroma notes.
Equatorial
Refers to plants from regions where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means where the plant never develop a sharp response to changing days. Such plants frequently flower slowly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The practical response, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the last weeks. It costs some yield yield and buys a earlier clearer end. A listing which says "equatorial" is warning you this in one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin has missed the instruction inside it.
Terpinolene (the "sativa smell")
A terpene present in large amounts in many classic sativa lines and responsible for most of the thing people mean as the "sativa" smell: green, woody, lemon and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by fast drying, and terpinolene fades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
To a seed buyer the word earns two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the leading terpene, the line probably carries substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the you wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure has to be cool and cool; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to a flower that smells of very little and nothing of what the pack promised.
Stretch (the doubling)
The burst of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half again; sativas routinely double, and a few landrace types go further. The stretch continues two to four weeks and cannot be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.
In tent terms, a stretch figure is a fact to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a standard tent is at the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica stock almost always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently under stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some capacity to do; sativa lines express it more, for a plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can trigger it off, and a old that has already waited beyond its natural finish frequently throws a few desperate male sacs on its own as a last attempt to set seed.
None of this makes a sativa strain unstable by nature; it makes the room's consistency matter for longer. Light-tight room, steady conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done rather than a weeks later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is worth more on a long-flowering line than on any other category.