The Sativa Vocabulary: Ten Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary around them than any other category of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says one thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow nearly always traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it leans heavily towards the classic end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the meanings though apply to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since not one of them is sense without the others.

Latitude

The one figure that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and a number that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need the autumn days to go on late enough for the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else watches it to mould in November. The closer to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and coastal and low-latitude growers can finish plants that northern gardens never will.

The practical rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the western United States, and every step further north of it pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel that wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or a greenhouse, and not a better season.

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A terpene found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and responsible for most of what people mean as a “sativa” smell: green, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost easily by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during the cure than the heavier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning stock.

To a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain probably has real Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage says. And when the you wants that profile to survive by the jar, the cure has to be slow and slow; a fast dry turns a terpinolene sativa into something that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack promised.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants shaped over generations to one region by local climate and growers together, rather than by deliberate selection. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the sativa examples. A landrace is variable, rather than a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than a tent-bred hybrid, and that spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The trap is buying a landrace like a finished product. It carries traits that make sense in an open field, including a frame that no tent can contain and a flowering rhythm set to a equatorial daylength most growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is nearer to manageable but nonetheless far from uniform. A seller listing “landrace” without a collection region and a reproduction count is applying the word as a flavour, and the seeds should be judged with that in mind.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

Originally a particular line of plants bred in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and something metallic that no other line exactly reproduces.

In its second sense “Haze” is any hybrid that carries a share of that family, which by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing which reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be mostly percent the classic family or one sixteenth of it, and the flowering time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Flowering time

The number of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most misread number 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 grown after an eight-week vegetative period is a twenty-two-week plant. Breeders additionally give the optimistic end of a range, because the other end moves fewer seed.

Long-flowering plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that figure, which is a reasonable first pass if you have a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to the figure the pack says is seldom caught out.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

A catalogue category rather than a measurable one. The phrase generally means that more of a hybrid’s lineage were classed as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, which occasionally means no more than a certain the buds are longer or the aroma sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The experience people associate with a word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene profile and the cannabinoid balance than it is by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat couch result and plenty of indica-labelled stock deliver the reverse. For a buyer the label is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a predictor to effect it is next to worthless without the terpene description.

Intersex tendency

The appearance of male flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population has a degree of tendency to do; sativa lines show it more, and the reason is one plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering to set it going, and a plant plant has already waited past its natural end often throws a few desperate male flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.

None of these means a sativa line weak as a matter of course; it makes the grower’s discipline matter for longer. Light-tight tents, steady conditions and harvesting when the plant is done rather than two week later remove the greater part of the problem. A listing that mentions the breeder screens parents for hermaphrodite tendency is worth more on a sativa than for any other category.

Equatorial

Describes lines from regions in which daylength hardly varies through the year, and where the plant never develop a sharp response to shortening days. These plants frequently start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.

The practical response, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, particularly in the last weeks. It loses some yield yield and gains an earlier clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you about this with one word, and a grower that reads it as mere origin misses the point hidden in it.

Stretch (the doubling)

The surge of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace types go further. The stretch lasts three to four weeks and cannot be halted once it begins, only redirected by training.

In tent terms, the stretch figure is a fact worth reading ahead of choosing when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one flipped at thirty centimetres has room. Growers moving over from indica strains nearly always switch too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.

Foxtailing

The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, open buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of indica-leaning lines it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the cause.

In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will happen under a perfect room. A new sativa grower frequently spends a month hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and temperatures only delaying a long flower further. The listing seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage generally does.