The Sativa Dictionary: Ten Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds arrive with more jargon attached than any other category 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 grower trying to make a decision in front of the listing. A disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time read as a promise, a “sativa-dominant” tag read as a statement of character, a landrace chosen as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below are written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand as reference, since it leans heavily to the classic end of the category and that is where the words matter most; the definitions though hold to any sativa seed from any seller. They are in no special order, since not one of them is sense without the rest.

Foxtailing (and when it is not a fault)

The tendency of certain flowers to push out new calyx growth on top of old ones, giving spired, open buds rather than dense 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 lines, it is built in and will happen in a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes weeks hunting a problem that was never not a problem, lowering lights and heat and delaying a long plant further. The listing rarely warns which type to expect; the parentage usually tells you.

Equatorial

Refers to lines from latitudes in which daylength hardly changes across the year, which means where the plant does not develop a strong response to changing days. Such lines frequently flower slowly at a conventional twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an unremarkable day and not a signal.

The practical fix, passed around among sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly in the final weeks. It loses some yield yield and buys a more clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who reads it as mere geography misses the point inside it.

Haze

In its first sense a specific family of plants put together in coastal California from Colombian, Colombian and Thai parents, and later kept and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, fills out openly, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note sharp that no other line exactly has.

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 which says “Haze” and gives no parents could be mostly percent original old family or a small fraction of it, and the flowering time tracks the fraction, not the name. The useful question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Flowering time

The figure of weeks between the start of flowering and maturity, and the one most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. With photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started after a ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies also give the shorter end of a spread, because the longer end moves fewer seed.

Sativa lines take anywhere from ten weeks to more than twenty, and the longest line in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks from the flip. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is a sensible first step for a room on a tight schedule. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack says is seldom disappointed.

Intersex tendency

The production of pollen-bearing flowers on a female plant, typically late in flower and often in response to stress. Almost every cannabis population carries a degree of capacity for do; sativa plants express it more, for one plain one: sixteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of exposure for a timer leak, a heat spike or a missed watering that can trigger it going, and a plant that has gone beyond its intended end often throws a few desperate male sacs on its own as a final effort to make seed.

Not one of this makes a sativa line weak by nature; it makes the room’s consistency count for a longer stretch. A sealed room, steady temperatures and cutting the moment the plant is ready rather than two weeks after take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which mentions a breeder tests parents for hermaphrodite tendency is saying something worth hearing for a long-flowering line than on any else.

Stretch

The burst of vertical growth which comes after the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some landrace types triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and cannot be halted after it begins, merely redirected by training.

In tent terms, the stretch figure is the fact worth read before deciding when to switch. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres centimetres in a two-metre tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. Growers coming from indica stock nearly always switch too late the first time, and the consequence is visible on the ceiling of the tent.

Landrace

A population of plants shaped through centuries to a particular region by the local growers and climate together, and not by modern breeding. Thai, Colombian, Malawian and Oaxacan lines are the classic sativa examples. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and smells range far more than a tent-bred hybrid, and this spread is the whole value of keeping one.

The trap is treating a landrace as a finished product. It brings habits that made sense in an equatorial field, including height that no tent can hold and a flowering rhythm tuned to a daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced somewhere for some generations, often with a degree of selection towards tent conditions; it is nearer to usable but still not uniform. A shop listing “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.

Latitude

The single number that decides if a sativa will finish outdoors, and one no pack states. Equatorial plants require a autumn days to continue late enough to let the plant finish; at northern latitudes the frost comes before that, and the grower harvests a half-finished plant in late October or else watches it rot in November. A closer to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can finish plants that temperate growers never will.

The usable rule for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line harvest month is given for the breeder’s own latitude, normally a point in southern Europe or the west coast of the United States, and every degree further north of it pushes the date later towards the frost. A grower north of roughly the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa outdoors is looking for an autoflower or a greenhouse, not a longer season.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound found in high proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for much of what growers mean as a “sativa” smell: green, piney, citrus and faintly floral all at once. It is fragile, driven off quickly through hot drying, and it fades faster in the cure than the earthier terpenes that lead indica-leaning stock.

For a seed buyer the name earns two jobs. Where a listing lists terpinolene among the lead aromas, the strain most likely carries substantial Haze-era ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And when the you are after that smell to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be cool and slow; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene line to something that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack described.

Sativa-dominant

A marketing category and not a measurable one. It usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were classed as sativa according to the breeder who wrote the listing, which sometimes signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the aroma brighter than the same breeder’s indica-labelled lines.

The experience people connect with the word, lively instead of sedating, is driven far more by terpene chemistry and by cannabinoid content than it is by ancestry, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy result and plenty of indica-labelled stock do the reverse. To a grower the label is useful as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is close to worthless unless accompanied by the aroma description.