i’m also a newbie, but i whole-heartedly agree with @PTron. grow the right number of plants for your current setup to be at a good optimal, maintainable level. but you’re in a 4x8, which is a big space. i’m only in a 3x3, with whatever other extra small spaces or boxes i can cobble together.
so for you i imagine it’s more a matter of being sure you can maintain a good vpd for what you’ve got going on. whereas for me when i had a lot of plants heading into flower (i had ten plants, mostly in 1gallons), so with my smaller space i was having to figure out how i was going to juggle all of that, and they hadn’t even hit their flower stretch yet. there was no way they could all be happy in my 3x3. ultimately i gave two females away to friends, which was cool because i got to hang out with them and chat about growing weed now and also gift them a plant; i chopped down one male early, and then my remaining three males i took out of the tent to isolate for pollen collection.
getting to your questions though…
firstly, i have to say that is a surprising number of males you’ve got on your hands! i can’t believe the ratio. but thank you for taking that statistical hit for the rest of us, so now someone somewhere out there will get to have 10 females and 2 males, lol! that’s a noble sacrifice.
question 1: i’m not an experienced enough grower to know whether pollen hitting the females who are in pre-flower will cause them to create seeds or not. my general guess would be that if the plants have been grown together and are experiencing the same light cycles, that there could be some likelihood of early male pollen being able to pollinate whatever females are around and ready at that time. obviously i imagine much more successful pollination once the plant’s sexual organs are fully matured.
if you were only dealing with one male, i wouldn’t necessary consider this a problem since anything that is seeded you would know who the father is. but since you have so many males, it’s definitely something i would keep in mind and guard against.
additionally, from what i’ve read pollen can be viable in outside environments for possibly a week or two, depending on environmental conditions. pollen is supposed to be deactivated by water and moisture, but if conditions are good, who’s to say that the pollen wouldn’t float around until it lands somewhere that it could do it’s magic.
so if you want to minimize stray/random pollination, best to separate sooner rather than later.
i was fortunate enough to post a picture of my males right around when they were popping, before i knew what to look for. some og’ers were helpful enough to tell me that i should move my males out NOW if i didn’t want seeds. this was great advice, because the very next day my boys started dropping pollen. if i hadn’t made the move, i would have had more accidental pollination.
question 2: i agree it is a fun project to do a seed run. i would say where you keep your male depends on the space that you have to work with. if you have a room 100’ away, sure, that’d be an awesome place to put your male. but you also have to be aware of your air movement and any shared air circulation. like, are the rooms connected through the ac vents? because pollen can possibly float from one room to the next that way.
alternatively, i only really have my small bedroom to work with. i can’t put my males in another room and i don’t have a bathroom i can tuck them in for 12 hours. it’s just my living situation and i have to deal with it. so i chose my best male, cut him in half and stuck him in the big cardboard box that my ac infinity tent kit came in. i put a light and a small fan in there, and covered the box up while leaving a little gap for some air flow. but that big box was hanging right next to my 3x3 tent. obviously this isn’t an ideal environment and i’ve totally got some accidental pollination happening. but i’m mostly fine with that as the major element of my grow has been accomplished, which was to pollinate a few branches from each of my ladies with some pollen. i know seeds from those branches will very likely be from the male pollen donor, and any seeds from any where else will just be part of a mystery mix i can share or give away or continue to grow myself.
hopefully as i gain more experience and can work my grow space more, i will have less accidental pollination. because i’m sure we all would love to know the exact genetics of whatever we’re getting or working with. but for now it’s totally acceptable for me since i’m still a casual, new grower.
regarding storing pollen, i would highly encourage you to dry your pollen out as much as possible. i put them in glass vials with dessicant packs inside ziplock baggies. at the end of my pollen collection, i also found that spreading my pollen out onto a sheet of paper would help dry it as well. i think the paper fibers themselves were helping to absorb any leftover moisture in the pollen. it was very helpful. i document some of this in my grow journal, as @Dr.VitaminGreen has kindly pointed out.
question 3: i would probably be crazy and do both of those things. if you end up having too much to work with, it’s never a bad thing to give plants away to your friends. perhaps they’ll be good growers or perhaps they’ll kill your babies. but if you were just going to kill it anyways, i think it’s a cool fun thing to include your friends in this awesome hobby/passion of ours. you never know, you might spark the love in another person and bam, we’re one step closer to overgrowing the world!
i’ve only just started my grow journey recently, but the knowledge and more importantly, the community here is remarkable. so much better than reddit!
