Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a seed company and something different again to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the pack. The failed sativa grow usually goes back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label taken as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, because it leans strongly towards the classic end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are in no particular order, since none of them makes usable without the rest.
Flowering time
The number of weeks from the start of flowering and maturity, which is the one most misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light drops to twelve hours, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after an eight-week vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Breeders also quote the optimistic end of the spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.
Long-flowering lines take everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by that number, which is the reasonable first step if you have a room with a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is seldom caught out.
Foxtailing
The tendency of certain flowers to grow new calyx clusters on top of old ones, producing spired, open buds rather than round ones. In most indica-leaning strains it is a heat response, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.
In a good number of sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur under a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often spends a month chasing a fault that was never there, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already long flower further. The breeder rarely says which kind to expect; the lineage usually does.
Stretch (the doubling)
The surge of upward growth which comes after the switch to flowering. Indica-leaning plants add half their height again; sativas routinely double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch continues three to four weeks and will not be halted after it has started, only bent sideways by training.
In practical terms, a stretch multiplier is a number to reading before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a two-metre tent is at the lamp before week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres has room. People moving from indica strains almost always flip far too late the first time, and the lesson is written on the ceiling of the tent.
Terpinolene
A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many old sativa lines and accounting for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, lemon and slightly floral at once. It is volatile, lost quickly through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly in storage than the earthier terpenes which dominate most tent lines.
For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. When a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain most likely has substantial Haze-era genetics regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the grower wants that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a warm drying room flattens a terpinolene sativa into something that smells of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.
Sativa-dominant
A catalogue term rather than a botanical one. It generally indicates that the larger share of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa by the breeder who wrote the listing, and sometimes means no more than that the flowers are longer or the aroma sharper than the same breeder’s other lines.
The experience people associate with a word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed far more by terpene profile and the THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy effect and a good number of the opposite lines do exactly the reverse. For a buyer the percentage is useful for a rough hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is next to useless without the terpene notes.
Latitude
The one number that decides if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and one that no pack states. Equatorial lines need a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant finish; at high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in late October or else loses it rot in November. The further south, in the northern hemisphere, the longer the window runs, and coastal or low-latitude gardens are able to finish lines that temperate gardens cannot.
The usable rule of a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of it moves the date later into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa in the garden is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better season.
Landrace
A population of plants shaped over centuries to one region by local growers and climate together, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Mexican stock are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: within a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range far more than in any tent-bred line, and this spread is the point of growing one.
The trap is buying a landrace as a modern product. It brings traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually means a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, often with light selection for tent conditions; it is closer to usable but still not uniform. A shop listing “landrace” without an collection region and a generation count is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be judged accordingly.
Haze (the family, not the smell)
Originally a particular family of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and later preserved and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches openly, flowers for twelve sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, citrus and something metallic that no line exactly reproduces.
In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid which carries a share of that family, which today is most of the sativa-leaning catalogue. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage may be mostly percent the classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.
Equatorial (the twelve-hour problem)
Describes lines out of latitudes where daylength hardly changes through the year, which means that the plant never evolved a strong reaction to changing days. These lines often start flowering reluctantly at a standard twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, for them, a mild unremarkable day rather than a signal.
The working response, passed down among sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light further: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially in the last weeks. It loses a little yield and buys a earlier clearer end. A listing which says “equatorial” is warning you about this with one word, and a grower that takes it as mere geography misses the point inside it.
Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines
The appearance of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries some tendency to it; long-flowering lines express it more, for a simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a late watering that can set it off, and a plant that has gone past its intended end frequently throws a few desperate male flowers on its own as a final effort to set seed.
Not one of these means a sativa line weak by course; it means the grower’s discipline count for a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready rather than two weeks later take away most of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder screens parents for intersex traits is worth worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for anything else.
Recent Comments