The Sativa Dictionary: The Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds come with more jargon 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 person standing in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was understood in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” tag taken as a description of effect, a landrace chosen like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, because it leans heavily towards the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions though apply to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, because none of them is sense on its own without the others.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks between the onset of flowering and harvest, and the single most frequently misunderstood number on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is measured from the day the light drops to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown after a ordinary vegetative stage is a five-month plant. Seed companies also quote the optimistic end of a spread, since the other end sells fewer seed.

Long-flowering lines run everywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range is at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be filtered by this figure, which is the sensible first step if you have a grower on a tight schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack states is rarely caught out.

Latitude

The one figure that determines whether a sativa can ripen outdoors, and one that no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a run of shortening days to continue late enough for the plant to ripen; at high latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests a unripe plant in the end of October or watches it to mould in November. A closer south, within the northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal and subtropical growers are able to finish lines that temperate growers never will.

The practical rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is given for the breeder’s own latitude, usually a point within temperate Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every step further north of it pushes the date later towards the frost. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a long-flowering sativa in the garden needs to be looking for a sativa autoflower or a covered space, and not a longer summer.

Sativa-dominant

The marketing term rather than a measurable one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s parents are classed as sativa according to whoever drafted the description, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are longer or the smell brighter than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.

The experience people associate with the word, lively instead of sedating, is governed more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a heavy sleepy effect while a good number of the opposite lines do the reverse. For a grower the percentage is useful as a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to worthless without the aroma notes.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound found in large proportion in many old sativa lines and responsible for much of what growers mean as the “sativa” aroma: green, woody, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly through fast drying, and it degrades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes which lead most tent lines.

For a seed buyer the name does two things. Where a listing names terpinolene among the leading aromas, the strain most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry whatever the label says. And when the grower wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a warm dry flattens a terpinolene line into something that smells of hay and no trace of what the pack promised.

Equatorial

Describes plants from latitudes in which daylength barely changes through the year, which means that the plant does not develop a sharp reaction to changing days. Such lines often start flowering slowly under a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, because twelve hours is, for them, a mild ordinary day and not a signal.

The working response, passed down between sativa growers over decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, sometimes ten, especially during the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and gains an more decisive end. A listing that uses “equatorial” is telling you about this in one word, and a grower who takes it as mere origin has missed the instruction hidden in it.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and frequently in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity for do; sativa lines express it more often, for one simple one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a light leak, a temperature spike or a missed watering that can set it going, and an old that has already waited beyond its intended end frequently produces a few desperate male sacs on its own as a final effort to set seed.

None of this means a sativa strain weak by nature; it makes the room’s consistency matter for a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and harvesting the moment the plant is ready and not two week later take away the greater part of the risk. A listing which mentions the breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is worth worth hearing on a long-flowering line than for anything else.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped over generations to one place by the local growers and climate alike, and not by modern breeding. Thai, Thai, Congolese and Oaxacan stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, finishing times and smells spread far more than any tent-bred line, and that spread is the point of keeping one.

The mistake is buying a landrace like a modern product. It carries habits that make sense in an equatorial field, including a frame no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a daylength the majority of growers cannot provide. “Heirloom” on a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been grown out away from its origin for some generations, often with a degree of selection for tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A seller listing “landrace” without an collection point and a reproduction count is using the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.

Foxtailing

The tendency of some flowers to push out fresh calyx clusters on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds instead of dense ones. In most tent-bred lines it is a heat response, typically from light too close or a room too high, and the standard response is to correct the room.

In many sativas, above all Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and is going to occur under a perfect room. A first-time sativa grower often spends weeks chasing a fault that is not a problem, dropping lights and heat only delaying an already long flower further. The breeder rarely warns which type to expect; the parentage usually does.

Haze

Originally a particular line of plants bred in coastal California from Mexican, Colombian and South Indian landraces, and then kept and refined in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, fills out sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of spice, pine and a note metallic that no line quite has.

In its second sense “Haze” is whatever hybrid that contains some of that family, and today is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing which says “Haze” without parents could be mostly percent original old family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow character follows the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and via which parent”.