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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, another to a breeder and something different again to the person trying to make a decision in front of the listing. The disappointing sativa grow usually traces back to a word that was read in the wrong sense: a flowering time taken as a fixed number, a “sativa-dominant” label read as a statement of effect, a landrace bought like it were a tent-bred hybrid. The entries below were written with the range at https://hazesativaseeds.com to hand for the concrete examples, since it runs strongly to the long-flowering end of the spectrum and that is where the vocabulary matter most; the definitions themselves hold to any sativa seed from any shop. They are given in no particular order, because not one of them makes sense on its own without the rest.

Latitude (outdoor sativas)

The one figure that determines whether a sativa can finish outdoors, and one that no pack states. Equatorial lines need the autumn days to go on late enough for the plant finish; in high latitudes the frost arrives first, and the grower cuts a unripe plant in the end of October or else loses it to mould in November. The further south, in a northern hemisphere, the longer the season stretches, and Mediterranean or subtropical growers can finish lines that temperate growers never will.

The usable rule for a seed listing: an “outdoor” sativa harvest date is given for the breeder’s home latitude, normally a point within temperate Europe or the western United States, and each step north of it pushes the date back towards the weather. A grower above roughly the fiftieth parallel that is after a true sativa outdoors needs to be shopping for an autoflower or else a greenhouse, and not a longer summer.

Sativa-dominant

The marketing category and not a measurable one. It generally indicates that more of a hybrid’s lineage are described as sativa according to whoever wrote the description, which occasionally means no more than that the buds are airier or the smell sharper than the that breeder’s indica-labelled releases.

The effect people connect with a word, lively rather than sedating, is governed far more by terpene profile and the THC content than it is by the sativa fraction, and a good number of “sativa-dominant” hybrids produce a heavy sleepy result and a good number of the opposite stock deliver the reverse. For a buyer the label is useful for a loose hint to growth habit, flowering time and stretch; for a predictor to how it feels it is next to worthless without the terpene description.

Landrace versus heirloom

A population of plants shaped through generations to a particular region by the local growers and growers alike, and not by deliberate breeding. Colombian, Colombian, Malawian and Mexican lines are the classic sativa cases. A landrace is variable, not a one plant: inside a pack the heights, finishing times and smells range far more than any tent-bred line, and that variation is the point of growing one.

The trap is treating a landrace as a finished product. It carries habits that made sense in an open field, such as height no tent can contain and a flowering clock tuned to a equatorial daylength most growers cannot offer. “Heirloom” in a listing usually refers to a landrace that has been reproduced away from its origin over some generations, typically with a degree of selection for indoor conditions; it is closer to usable but nonetheless not a hybrid. A seller offering “landrace” that does not give a collection point and a reproduction history is applying the word loosely, and the pack should be priced accordingly.

Haze

Originally a specific family of plants put together in 1970s California from Colombian, Colombian and South Indian parents, and then preserved and refined in the Netherlands. The Haze runs tall, branches sparsely, flowers for twelve to to sixteen weeks and carries a scent of incense, citrus and a note metallic that no other line quite has.

In its looser sense “Haze” is any hybrid that contains some of that family, and by now is a great many of the sativa-leaning market. A listing that reads “Haze” without lineage may be eighty percent original classic family or a sixteenth of it, and the grow time tracks the fraction, not the name. The working question is never “is it a Haze” but “how much, and through which parent”.

Flowering time (and what it is counted from)

The number of weeks from the onset of flowering and harvest, which is 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, rather than from sowing, so a “fourteen-week” sativa grown with an ordinary vegetative period is a five-month plant. Seed companies additionally give the optimistic end of a spread, since the other end moves fewer seed.

Long-flowering lines run everywhere 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 switch. The catalogue can be sorted by that number, which is the sensible first pass for a grower on a fixed timetable. A grower who allows four weeks on top of whatever the pack states is rarely disappointed.

Terpinolene (the “sativa smell”)

A terpene found in large proportion in a lot of classic sativa lines and responsible for most of what growers mean as a “sativa” smell: green, woody, lemon and faintly floral all at once. It is volatile, lost easily by hot drying, and it degrades more quickly during storage than the earthier terpenes that lead most tent stock.

To a seed buyer the name earns two things. Where a listing names terpinolene as the lead aromas, the strain probably has real old-sativa genetics regardless of what the label claims. And where the grower wants that profile to still be there to the jar, the cure is going to be slow and cool; a fast drying room turns a terpinolene sativa to something that tastes of hay and leaves no trace of what the pack described.

Hermaphroditism in long-flowering lines

The production of male flowers on a female plant, usually towards the end in flower and frequently under stress. Every cannabis population has some capacity for it; sativa lines express it more often, for one plain reason: fourteen weeks of flower is fourteen weeks of opportunity for a timer leak, a heat spike or a late watering to trigger it going, and an old that has gone beyond its intended end frequently throws a few late pollen sacs on its own as a last effort to set seed.

Not one of these means a sativa line unstable as a matter of nature; it makes the room’s discipline count over a longer stretch. A sealed tents, steady temperatures and harvesting when the plant is done rather than a weeks later take away the greater part of the problem. A listing which states a breeder tests parents for intersex tendency is saying something more on a sativa than for any other category.

Equatorial

Refers to lines from latitudes in which daylength hardly changes across the year, and where the plant never evolved a sharp reaction to changing days. These lines often start flowering slowly at a conventional twelve-hour light cycle, since twelve hours is, to them, a mild ordinary day rather than a signal.

The working fix, handed around between sativa growers for decades, is to shorten the light further: eleven hours, occasionally ten, particularly during the final weeks. It costs a yield yield and buys an earlier clearer finish. A listing which uses “equatorial” is telling you this in one word, and a grower who takes it as a note on geography has missed the instruction hidden in it.

Stretch (the doubling)

The burst of upward growth that follows the change to flowering. Indica-leaning plants gain half their height again; sativas commonly double, and some equatorial lines triple. The stretch lasts three to five weeks and will not be halted once it has started, merely bent sideways by training.

In practical terms, the stretch figure is the fact to read before deciding when to flip. A sativa switched at sixty centimetres inside a standard tent is touching the lamp by week four of flower; one switched at thirty centimetres centimetres has room. People moving over from indica stock nearly always flip too late the first time, and the consequence is written on the ceiling of the tent.

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