The Sativa Dictionary: The Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds come with more jargon around them than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a breeder and a third to the grower standing in front of the pack. A failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was understood in the wrong one of those senses: a flowering time taken 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 as the concrete examples, because it runs heavily towards the long-flowering end of the category and that is where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since not one of them is usable without the others.

Haze

In its first sense a particular family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other line quite has.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains a share of that family, and by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no parents may be mostly percent the classic family or a 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”.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line has a degree of capacity to do; long-flowering lines show it more often, and the reason is a plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is sixteen weeks of exposure for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can set it going, and a old that has waited beyond its natural finish frequently produces a few late male flowers on its own as a last effort to set seed.

None of this makes a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it means the room’s discipline count over a longer stretch. A sealed room, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not two weeks after remove the greater part of the risk. A listing that states the breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more for a long-flowering line than for anything else.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

A catalogue term and not a measurable one. It usually indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the description, and occasionally means nothing more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The experience people associate with the word, clear-headed instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and the THC content than it is by ancestry, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a flat couch effect while plenty of indica-labelled lines deliver exactly the opposite. For a grower the label is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to how it feels it is next to useless without the aroma notes.

Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)

Describes lines from latitudes where daylength hardly varies across the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp response to changing days. Such lines frequently start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.

The working response, handed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially in the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a more decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who reads it as mere origin has missed the point inside it.

Terpinolene

A terpene present in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for much of what growers mean as a “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and slightly floral at once. It is fragile, driven off easily by fast drying, and it fades more quickly during the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.

For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the leading terpene, the strain probably carries substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower are after that profile to survive by the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a fast dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that smells of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.

Stretch (the doubling)

The surge of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants add around half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch continues two to five weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, only bent sideways by training.

In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is a fact worth read ahead of deciding when to switch. A sativa flipped at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving from indica stock almost always flip far too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.

Foxtailing

The tendency of some flowers to grow fresh calyx growth on top of existing ones, giving spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat response, usually caused by light that is too close or a room too high, and the advice is to correct the cause.

In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is built in and is going to occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower frequently wastes weeks hunting a fault that was never not a problem, dropping lights and heat and slowing a long flower further. The breeder rarely warns which kind you should expect; the parentage usually tells you.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one number that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial lines need the run of shortening days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or watches it rot in November. A closer south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and coastal or low-latitude gardens can ripen lines that northern gardens never will.

The practical rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line finishing date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it moves the date back towards the weather. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for an autoflower or a covered space, not a longer summer.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks from the onset of flowering and maturity, and the one most misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of the range, because the other end moves fewer seed.

Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this figure, which is the sensible first pass for a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.

Landrace

A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by the local climate and growers alike, rather than by modern selection. Thai, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is a spread, rather than a one plant: within a pack the heights, finishing times and aromas spread far more than in any tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of keeping one.

The trap is treating a landrace like a finished product. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock set to an equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent life; it is nearer to usable but still far from uniform. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a origin point and a generation history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.