The Sativa Dictionary: Ten Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds come with more jargon attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and a good deal of it says a certain thing to a botanist, something else to a breeder and a third to the grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. 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 taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a modern hybrid. The entries below were put together with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com open for reference, because it runs heavily towards the classic end of the category where the vocabulary carry the most weight most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are given in no special order, since not one of them makes sense without the others.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, usually late in flower and often under stress. Almost every cannabis line carries a degree of tendency for it; sativa plants express it more, for one simple reason: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a heat spike or a missed watering to trigger it going, and a old that has already gone past its intended finish frequently throws a few late male sacs on its own in a final attempt to make seed.

Not one of these means a sativa line unstable by course; it makes the room’s consistency count for longer. Light-tight room, stable conditions and cutting the moment the plant is done rather than two week after take away the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex traits is worth worth hearing for a sativa than on anything else.

Haze

In its first sense a particular line of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai landraces, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, takes for twelve to to sixteen weeks and smells of spice, citrus and something sharp that no line exactly reproduces.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid which contains some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” and gives no lineage may be eighty percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time follows the share, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and maturity, and the single most misunderstood number on a sativa pack. For 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 five-month plant. Breeders additionally quote the shorter end of a range, because the other end sells fewer seed.

Sativa plants take everywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the slowest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at around 16 weeks from the switch. The catalogue can be filtered by this number, which is the reasonable first step for a grower on a fixed schedule. A grower who allows four weeks to whatever the pack says is seldom disappointed.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The single number that decides whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Long-flowering lines need the autumn days to go on late enough to let the plant ripen; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in the end of October or watches it rot in November. A further to the equator, within the northern hemisphere, the longer the season runs, and coastal or low-latitude gardens are able to ripen lines that temperate growers cannot.

The usable rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing date is stated for the breeder’s home latitude, usually somewhere within southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of that moves the date back into the weather. A grower above about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a greenhouse, not a better summer.

Sativa-dominant (the label)

A catalogue term rather than a measurable one. It usually means that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the description, which sometimes signals no more than a certain the flowers are airier or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.

The effect people connect with a word, clear-headed instead of heavy, is governed more by terpene chemistry and the THC balance than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases produce a heavy sleepy result while plenty of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. To a buyer the label is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to effect it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma notes.

Equatorial

Describes plants out of regions where daylength hardly varies across the year, which means that the plant does not evolved a strong response to changing days. Such lines often start flowering reluctantly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, to them, a mild unremarkable 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 in the final weeks. It loses a yield yield and gains an earlier clearer end. A listing that says “equatorial” is telling you this with one word, and a grower that takes it as a note on origin misses the instruction hidden in it.

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A terpene present in large proportion in many old sativa strains and accounting for most of the thing growers mean as a “sativa” aroma: green, piney, citrus and slightly sweet at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly by fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during storage than the heavier terpenes which lead indica-leaning stock.

For a seed buyer the word does two jobs. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead terpene, the strain most likely has real Haze-era genetics whatever the label says. And where the grower wants that profile to survive to the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a warm drying room turns a terpinolene line into a flower that tastes of very little and no trace of what the pack promised.

Foxtailing

The habit of certain flowers to grow fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving towered, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In the majority of tent-bred lines it is a stress symptom, usually from light that is too close or temperatures that is too high, and the advice is to correct the room.

In many sativas, especially Southeast Asian and certain Haze hybrids, it is genetic and is going to happen in a flawless room. A first-time sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a fault that is there, lowering lights and temperatures and delaying an already long plant further. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the lineage generally does.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants adapted over generations to a particular region by the local climate and climate together, and not by modern breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Congolese and Oaxacan lines are the sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells spread widely than in a tent-bred line, and this spread is the point of growing one.

The mistake is treating a landrace like a finished product. It carries habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can hold and a flowering clock tuned to an daylength the majority of growers never offer. “Heirloom” on a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, typically with light selection towards indoor life; it is closer to usable but still not uniform. A shop offering “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a reproduction count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.