Decoding Sativa Seed Packs: The Glossary

Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and something different again to the person standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a description of character, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, since it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no particular order, because not one of them is usable without the rest.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The number of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a eight-week vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a range, since the other end moves less seed.

Long-flowering lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the sensible first pass for a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.

Intersex tendency

The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of capacity to do; sativa lines show it more often, for a plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a late watering to set it going, and a old that has waited past its intended end often produces a few late pollen sacs on its own in a last attempt to make seed.

None of this means a sativa line unstable by nature; it makes the grower’s discipline count for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done and not a weeks later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which states the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more for a long-flowering line than on anything else.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

In its first sense a specific family of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. The Haze grows tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something sharp that no other line quite reproduces.

In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Foxtailing

The tendency of certain flowers to push out new calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing spired, open buds instead of round ones. In most indica-leaning strains it is a stress symptom, typically from light that is too close or temperatures too high, and the standard response is to correct the cause.

In many sativas, above all Thai and certain Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to happen under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a problem that was never not there, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying a long plant even more. The listing seldom says which kind to expect; the parentage usually tells you.

Sativa-dominant

A marketing term rather than a measurable one. The phrase generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the listing, and occasionally means no more than that the buds are longer or the aroma brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The experience people associate with a word, clear-headed rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid balance than by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy effect and a good number of indica-labelled lines do the opposite. For a grower the label is worth something for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to effect it is next to worthless unless accompanied by the terpene description.

Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)

Refers to plants out of latitudes where daylength barely changes through the year, which means where the plant does not develop a strong response to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering reluctantly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day and not a signal.

The practical response, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to shorten the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly during the last weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains an more decisive finish. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as mere geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.

Stretch (the doubling)

The burst of vertical growth which follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain around half again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be halted once it begins, merely bent sideways by training.

In practical terms, the stretch figure is a number worth reading before deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local climate and climate together, rather than by deliberate selection. Colombian, Thai, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range widely than any tent-bred line, and that spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It brings traits that make sense in an equatorial field, such as a frame no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an equatorial daylength most growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing generally means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere for some generations, often with light selection towards tent life; it is nearer to usable but still not a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” that does not give an origin region and a generation count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be priced with that in mind.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound present in large proportion in many old sativa lines and accounting for much of what people mean as the “sativa” smell: fresh, woody, citrus and faintly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through hot drying, and terpinolene degrades faster during the cure than the earthier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning stock.

To a seed buyer the word does two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain most likely has substantial old-sativa genetics regardless of what the label claims. And when the grower wants that smell to survive to the jar, the cure has to be cool and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene sativa into a flower that tastes of very little and nothing of what the pack described.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one number that decides whether a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial plants need the run of shortening days to go on long enough for the plant ripen; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and Mediterranean or low-latitude gardens are able to finish plants that northern growers cannot.

The usable reading for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each step further north of that moves the date back into the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a better season.