Your pheno is way different than mine. I ordered feminized seed from Greenhouse. 4 ea of lemon skunk, hawaiian snow, super silver haze, big bang, white rhino. I have 3 different plants that are very different. At 8 weeks, I have one ready to harvest at 38". Beautiful and frosty. It has the skinniest leaves and it is all buds, hardly any leaves. Will be really easy to trim! 2nd one is almost 5 feet tall, really bushy because I topped it early. (i topped all of them, though)also has Sativa leaves. Also has a lot of buds, but not big thick long buds like my indica big bangs and white rhino (also currently growing). 3rd plant has thicker leaves with a more indica appearance. That is a month behind the other 2, but definitely different pheno.
I was wondering if anyone was going to say something along the lines of what you said. I grew Green House Seeds Lemon Skunk twice and both times most plants were a sativa phenotype. They had skinny leaves like the Crypt Keepers fingers and you could forget about the double to triple in height in flower, mine jumped up almost SIX times in height. I do not recall the exact number of flowering weeks/days but it did take about a week and a half longer than the longest date flowering time and that was for mostly cloudy trichomes with a few clear remaining.
The high was mostly sativa, though I am NOT a lover of amber trichomes so maybe with some amber there would have been more couch-lock but mine was like a smooth but HIGH sativa high with about .5mg of Valium added later in the buzz
. after the speedy part slowed down then a very nice mellow replaced it.
One thing I noticed is mine seemed to become much better with a longer cure. A few days before harvest I nipped a sample bud and I got rather high from it. After drying I kept a few buds out and the rest went into jars. The herb did not seem as potent as the earlier sample bud. After about 2-weeks curing I tried it again and again it did not seem as potent as the early sample bud.
I had grown several other strains at the same time so I smoked them and let the Lemon Skunk sit thinking that it just was not all I had expected and had to wonder how it won a Cup. After I had smoked a fair bit of the rest of my harvest I figured I should work some Lemon Skunk into my toking since I had it and it would help make the better stuff last longer.
After what I am guessing was about a month and a half to two months in jars the Lemon Skunk was like night and day in difference. I do not know if it is Green House Seeds Lemon Skunk genetics or just a freak occurrence in my case but it seemed to go downhill from the early test until harvest and then around 2-weeks in cure and then got way, WAY better after a long cure. Then I was capable of understanding why if won a Cup.
A short version of what to me is a funny story is I have neighbors that are cool, the wife and an old boyfriend used to sell pot when they were in high school and while in college, but later in life after getting married and having children she stopped and her hubby had stopped before then.
They asked me over for dinner and while there the husband was telling me about how frustrating things had been for them lately, they are trying to move and it has turned into a real pain, and he said if I had a joint on me he would be interested.
I had gotten high with his wife before they had gotten married but never with him and while I knew in the past he did I was not sure if he was joking. I slipped home and stuck a small bud in a little pipe and came back and said if he wasnt joking we could get high.
After we ate the husband did one hit and the wife did about a hit and a half, one decent one and a baby toke. In no time at all while nice and high I was baby sitting both of them and their two kids.
The next day the wife called me and said what the fu@k did you give us? Both said they had never been so high.
Myself I would not rank Green House Seeds as highly as they have spoken about it since but it can be rather good and if someone grows it they might want to at least try curing some for a fair bit longer than usual and see if like in my case it becomes MUCH better.
Given its price it is one of the strains in Arjan's line I consider to be a good value.