Reading Sativa Seed Packs: The Glossary

Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means 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 failed sativa grow nearly always 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” label taken as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, since it runs strongly towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the vocabulary matter most; the meanings themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no special order, because not one of them is usable without the others.

Haze

Originally a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and Thai parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid that carries a share of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent the old family or one sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is not “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.

Terpinolene

A terpene present in high amounts in many classic sativa lines and responsible for most of what people mean as the “sativa” aroma: fresh, piney, citrus and faintly sweet all at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.

To a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the label claims. And when the you are after that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of hay and nothing of what the pack promised.

Equatorial

Describes lines out of latitudes in which daylength hardly varies across the year, which means that the plant never evolved a strong response to changing days. These plants frequently flower slowly under a standard twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, an ordinary day and not a signal.

The working fix, handed around among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, especially during the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a more decisive finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on geography has missed the point inside it.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population has some capacity for do; long-flowering lines express it more, for a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it going, and an plant plant has gone beyond its intended finish often throws a few desperate male sacs on its own as a last effort to set seed.

Not one of this means a sativa strain weak as a matter of nature; it makes the grower’s consistency count over longer. A sealed tents, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is ready and not two week later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing which states a breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite traits is worth more for a sativa than on anything else.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

The catalogue term and not a measurable one. It generally means that more of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by whoever drafted the listing, and sometimes signals no more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven more by terpene chemistry and the cannabinoid content than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy effect and a good number of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. For a grower the label is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to how it feels it is close to useless without the aroma notes.

Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)

The tendency of certain flowers to push out fresh bud growth on top of old ones, producing towered, irregular buds instead of round ones. In the majority of indica-leaning strains it is a stress response, usually caused by light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.

In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze lines, it is genetic and is going to happen in a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks chasing a fault that is not a problem, dropping lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant even more. The listing seldom warns which type to expect; the parentage generally tells you.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one number that decides if a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to go on late enough for the plant to ripen; at northern latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower cuts an half-finished plant in late October or loses it to mould in November. A further south, within a northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and Mediterranean and low-latitude gardens can ripen plants that northern growers cannot.

The usable rule of a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally somewhere in southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and each degree further north of that moves the finish back towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who is after a long-flowering sativa in the garden is shopping for a sativa autoflower or else a covered space, and not a longer season.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, and the one most misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally give the shorter end of a spread, since the longer end moves less seed.

Sativa lines take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks after the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is a sensible first step if you have a grower with a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants shaped through centuries to one region by the local growers and growers alike, rather than by modern selection. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range far more than in a tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the point of growing one.

The trap is treating a landrace like a finished hybrid. It brings habits that make sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm tuned to an equatorial daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere over some generations, typically with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give a origin region and a reproduction history is applying the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged with that in mind.

Stretch

The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial types go further. The stretch lasts two to four weeks and cannot be stopped after it has started, merely redirected by training.

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