I like your style, that is what I do, I only use males if I love their sisters. On a smaller scale, much smaller..... This is actually discouraging, realizing so so many people have more space and do much better job than I do! Oh well, like buying a lottery ticket, I might get lucky.
Thanks Santa! And PLEASE do not be discouraged. There are certainly better growers out there, but I have been doing this for many, many years. The simplest advice is give your plants love and LOTS of veg time. This project was a once in lifetime kind of thing for me, as all the variables came together to allow it.
As for space, you would be surprised at how little I had. My main flower room is ~50 sqft, and it would always have about 25 ladies in various stages. One of my tricks (to keep the most even canopy possible in main room despite flowering many strains and phenos) was to use a 4x4 stretching tent. Ladies would spend first 2-3 weeks flowering in tent under 1k HPS before going into main room with DE HPS.
Vegging was done in two stages as well. I used about 25 sqft and dozens of screw in LEDs to start seeds, early veg and most importantly to keep the shit ton of males and clones that I was accumulating. At first (6 months), I was keeping everything thinking that I would use it somehow, but after I started getting many more breeder packs of seeds, I had to start making "executive decisions", which was deciding which plants to keep or kill. Most got the later.
Final stage of vegging is done in a 5x5 tent with a 1k MH with 10K bulb. Plants are typically transplanted to final pot size (3 gallon fabric pots with 2.25 gallon of pure coco) and placed in this tent for 2-4 weeks. I like 10-12 dominant tops, so I am training during the entire vegging process, which for most plants was ~10 weeks. Lights are 24/0 the entire veg cycle.
So, all of this was done in less than ~120 sqft of lighted space in three different areas. If I had some big ass greenhouse in a legal state, then this would have been done differently, perhaps. But also perhaps, if you grow out 100s of plants simultaneously, I imagine that it would be very difficult to really discern the differences. With this project, I would have around 10-15 different female plants to sample every month, and REALLY try each one to its fullest, including making a variety of advanced extracts.
One thing I am very curious about though, someone might know the answer, say you have a super stud, you clone it, flower one clone under optimal condition, and one clone by the window seal with marginal condition, would the pollen be has good? only less of it? I guess I already know the answer to my question, but maybe I am wrong.
That is a most excellent question indeed! Off the top of my head, I would say that the pollen is exactly the same. We want trichomes from the female flowers and these undergo a very complex chemical process as the plants age. Conditions effect the plants ability to thrive and get the very most of its genetics, but the conditions do not effect the genetics themselves. With that logic, I would deduce that the genetic material in the pollen would not be altered (much) by basic differences in growing conditions. If you are talking about significant stress like major light leaks, nutrient deficiency or others, then it might be a different story. This is my 2 cents (with a lot of guesswork)...