Sativa Seeds, Term by Term

Sativa seeds arrive with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it means a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and a third to the person 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” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for the concrete examples, because it runs heavily to the classic end of the spectrum and that is where the words matter most; the definitions themselves apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no particular order, since not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.

Flowering time

The number of weeks from the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misunderstood figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from germination, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies additionally quote the optimistic end of the spread, because the other end moves fewer seed.

Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at around 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first step for a grower on a tight timetable. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is rarely caught out.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and often in response to stress. Every cannabis population has some capacity to do; sativa lines express it more often, for a plain one: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it off, and an plant plant has already gone beyond its natural end frequently produces a few late male flowers on its own in a final effort to set seed.

None of this makes a sativa strain unstable by nature; it makes the room’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady conditions and cutting when the plant is ready and not a weeks after remove most of the problem. A listing which mentions the breeder screens parents for intersex traits is saying something more for a long-flowering line than on anything else.

Landrace

A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular place by the local climate and growers alike, rather than by deliberate breeding. Thai, Thai, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and aromas spread widely than in any tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of keeping one.

The trap is treating a landrace like a finished hybrid. It carries habits that make sense in an open field, such as height that no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to an daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” on a listing usually means a landrace that has been grown out somewhere over a number of generations, typically with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but still not a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give an collection region and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the seeds should be priced accordingly.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The single number that determines if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Long-flowering plants need a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant ripen; at northern latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower harvests an unripe plant in the end of October or else watches it to mould in November. A further south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal or low-latitude growers are able to ripen lines that temperate growers never will.

The practical reading of a seed listing: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere in temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step further north of that pushes the date back towards the frost. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa outdoors needs to be looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better season.

Stretch (the doubling)

The burst of upward growth which follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and cannot be halted after it has started, only redirected by training.

In tent terms, a stretch multiplier is the number to read ahead of deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres inside 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 switch too late the first time, and the lesson is visible on the ceiling of the tent.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

A marketing category rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents are described as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, which sometimes signals nothing more than a certain the flowers are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s other releases.

The effect people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed far more by terpene profile and by cannabinoid balance than by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids deliver a heavy couch effect while plenty of indica-labelled stock do the opposite. To a grower the percentage is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; as a guide to effect it is close to worthless without the terpene notes.

Haze

In its first sense a particular family of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian parents, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, pine and a note sharp that no other line exactly reproduces.

In its looser sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and today is a great many of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no parents could be eighty percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Equatorial

Describes lines from latitudes in which daylength barely varies through the year, and that the plant never develop a strong response to changing days. These lines frequently flower slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day and not a signal.

The working fix, passed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It costs some little yield and buys a earlier decisive end. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this in one word, and a grower that reads it as mere geography misses the point inside it.

Terpinolene

A terpene present in large proportion in a lot of old sativa lines and accounting for most of what growers describe as the “sativa” smell: fresh, piney, lemon and faintly floral at once. It is fragile, lost quickly by hot drying, and it fades faster during the cure than the heavier terpenes that lead most tent lines.

For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene among the leading aromas, the line most likely carries substantial old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the label claims. And when the grower are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and slow; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line into something that smells of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.

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