The Sativa Dictionary: Ten Words to Learn Before You Buy

Sativa seeds come with more vocabulary attached than any other kind of cannabis seed, and most of it says a certain thing to a botanist, another to a seed company and something different again to the grower standing in front of the listing. The failed 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” tag read as a description of character, a landrace bought as if it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for reference, because it leans strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum where the words carry the most weight most; the meanings though hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, since none of them is sense on its own without the rest.

Foxtailing

The habit of certain flowers to push out fresh bud clusters on top of old ones, producing spired, irregular buds rather than dense ones. In most tent-bred strains it is a heat symptom, typically caused by light too close or a room that is too high, and the standard response is to fix the room.

In a good number of sativas, especially Southeast Asian and some Haze hybrids, it is built in and will occur under a flawless room. A new sativa grower often wastes a month chasing a fault that is not there, dropping lights and temperatures only delaying an already slow plant further. The breeder seldom says which type you should expect; the parentage generally does.

Stretch

The surge of upward growth that follows the switch to flowering. Most tent-bred plants gain around half again; sativas routinely double, and some landrace lines triple. The stretch lasts two to five weeks and will not be halted after it begins, only bent sideways by training.

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

Equatorial

Describes lines from latitudes in which daylength hardly changes through the year, and where the plant does not evolved a sharp response to shortening days. These lines frequently start flowering slowly at a standard twelve-hour schedule, since twelve hours is, for them, an ordinary day rather than a signal.

The practical response, handed around between sativa growers for decades, is to cut the light more: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys an more clearer finish. A listing that says “equatorial” is warning you this with one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography misses the point inside it.

Landrace

A population of plants adapted through generations to a particular region by local climate and growers alike, rather than by modern breeding. Colombian, Thai, Malawian and Mexican stock are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is a spread, rather than a single plant: inside a pack the flowering times, flowering times and aromas range far more than in any tent-bred line, and this variation is the whole value of growing one.

The trap is buying a landrace like a finished product. It carries traits that made sense in an open field, including a frame that no tent can hold and a flowering clock set to an daylength the majority of growers never provide. “Heirloom” in a listing generally refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin for a number of generations, often with light selection for tent conditions; it is closer to manageable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” without an collection region and a generation count is using the word as a flavour, and the pack should be judged accordingly.

Sativa-dominant

A marketing term rather than a botanical one. The phrase usually means that the larger share of a hybrid’s parents were described as sativa by whoever drafted the listing, which occasionally signals nothing more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the same breeder’s indica-labelled releases.

The effect people associate with a word, lively rather than heavy, is governed far more by terpene chemistry and the THC balance than by the sativa fraction, and plenty of “sativa-dominant” releases deliver a flat sleepy result while a good number of indica-labelled lines do the reverse. For a buyer the percentage is worth something as a loose guide to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a guide to how it feels it is close to worthless without the terpene notes.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one number that decides if a sativa will ripen outdoors, and a number no pack prints. Equatorial plants need a autumn days to go on long enough to let the plant to finish; in high latitudes the frost comes first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or loses it to mould in November. A further to the equator, within a northern hemisphere, the later the season runs, and coastal or subtropical growers are able to ripen lines that temperate growers never will.

The usable reading for a seed pack: an “outdoor” line finishing month is given for the breeder’s home latitude, usually a point in southern Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it moves the date back towards the frost. A grower north of about the fiftieth parallel who wants a true sativa in the garden needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a covered space, and not a better season.

Terpinolene

A aromatic compound found in large amounts in a lot of classic sativa strains and accounting for most of what people mean as the “sativa” smell: green, piney, lemon and slightly floral all at once. It is fragile, lost easily through fast drying, and it fades faster in storage than the heavier terpenes that dominate indica-leaning lines.

To a seed buyer the word earns two things. Where a listing lists terpinolene as the lead aromas, the line most likely has substantial old-sativa ancestry regardless of what the percentage claims. And where the you wants that smell to still be there by the jar, the cure has to be slow and cool; a warm dry turns a terpinolene line to something that tastes of very little and leaves nothing of what the pack described.

Flowering time

The number of weeks between the start of flowering and harvest, which is the single most frequently misread figure on a sativa pack. For photoperiod seed it is counted from the day the light is cut to twelve hours, not from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa started with a ordinary vegetative stage is a twenty-two-week plant. Seed companies also give the optimistic end of a spread, since the longer end sells less seed.

Long-flowering plants take anywhere from ten weeks to well over twenty, and the longest strain in the Haze Sativa Seeds range comes in at about 16 weeks after the switch. The catalogue can be sorted by this number, which is the sensible first pass if you have a grower with a fixed schedule. A grower who adds four weeks on top of the figure the pack says is rarely disappointed.

Haze (the family, not the smell)

In its first sense a specific line of plants put together in 1970s California from Mexican, Thai and South Indian landraces, and later kept and worked in the Netherlands. A true Haze grows tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to sixteen weeks and smells of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other other line exactly reproduces.

In its second sense “Haze” is any cross which contains some of that family, which by now is most of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” and gives no lineage could be eighty percent original old family or one 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 via which parent”.