That completely depends how big and vigorous your plants are and how much patience you have. A picture would help!

Agree with PC. Size of the plants is more important than anything else when it comes to leaving/removing blooms. In your zone it is well into bloom and fruit set time for many of us so the time isn't out of line. But the size of the plants may be. Many of my plants were planted May 15th but they are already 4 feet tall and almost as wide. They are blooming and I have fruit set on many of them as per normal for this time.

Dave

Mine are probably only about 2.5 ft tall. I'll take a picture when I get home

Thee only relevance of zone number to growing things like tomatillo, tomatoes, is the length of growing season : Namely ; when the danger of Lasf Frost (98% certainty) is over and when your FFD approaches. Whatever happens between those two frost dates has very little significance to do with summer growing condition I am not talking about FL, TX, AZ and SoCAL.
I can tell this with certainty that a lot of locations designated as "zone 6" has much favorable summer growing conditions than our zone 8. Then ATL, GA, Dallas Tx are also in zone 7b/8a., like Seattle WA. There is no relevance.

I pushed and pushed and started planting out on 4/8 til the end of April. Now a lot people in zones 6 and 7a are ahead of me in fruits setting.
Last year my tomatillo started setting fruits in September. (hehe , Zone 8 !!)
The best gauge for summer gardening is find out your HEAT ZONE number. Ours is ONE, the lowest, maybe similar, to zone 4 somewhere in Wisconsin.
JMO

Sey

I'm in 7a but only since the zones changes a few years ago. Till then I was 6b. My tomatillos are going wild and have been setting fruit for the last couple of weeks. I also have volunteer tomatoes and tomatillos all around the garden in any place they could get a foothold. I've pulled most but am letting a couple that settled along the fence grow just to see what happens.

To my mind our early spring here was cold, but the seeds apparently thought differently. I've never had as many volunteers, usually just a stray one here or there, and the weeds ran rampant through the perennial bed before it was anywhere nice enough to get out and take care of them. I'm still fighting that battle.

I wouldn't pull the flowers, just make sure the plants have support as they grow. Tomatillos put out a tremendous amount of fruit. If the earwigs hadn't gotten mine last year I'd have been swimming in salsa verde. Someone gave me a suggestion for taking care of them a few months ago -- I'll have to go search for that if they show their ugly pincers again. :)

I am in a similar climate. Definitely a weird Spring this year! My tomatoes are both growing and setting fruit at the same time. When they want to get rolling they will IMHO.. the first fruits ripen slow as the plants are dedicating more energy to growing. They know what they are doing. :)

My rhubarb has also bolted, and I can't say it bolted at all last year. It was a weird sight.

This is my first time growing tomatilos. I was really surprised how quickly they grew even in our cold and rainy spring. I had big hopes on them. Now they are huge and flowering like crazy. But what a surprise: they do not set any fruits!

Well, may be they'll improve when we have more hot weather.

Contrary, Aunt's Molly ground cherries, are 3 times smaller, and it is hard to find flowers on them, but they have many fruits forming right now.

I've never had a tomatillo... what do they taste like out of the garden?

Peter , tomatillos have very tangy taste. Some ripe onces have sweetness too.
So you add them to salsa/ salad. Then no need to add vinegar or lemon juice. Or that is my experience and impression of tomatillo .

Antmary, Yo will need to prune and stake them. Otherwise the branches will fall down /break ...

Sey

Idk that doesn't really sound good to me... I am envisioning an unripe tomato. :)

Z6 Boston area, I would say that is too early for blooms and fruit, I'm in Z6 PA and I pulled several blooms because the plants aren't ready yet, It has to do with all the hot humid weather and rain showers we have been having, There is a few varieties that are early but you didn't mention what variety you planted.

jimmy, I planted purple tomatilos. They were sowed in the middle of April and they were really fast growers. I put them in the ground in the beginning of May, when they were very small and leggy, with the couple of true leaves and forgot about them afterwards. Then after a couple of weeks I found big plants with many leaves and forming flower buds. This was surprising, since the weather was cold and rainy, and several nights it was in 40s. They keep flowering since the middle of May or so. They are about waist high now and keep growing. They outgrew the flimsy wire cages, and I put stakes around them. Yesterday I found a couple lanterns on them so they started to set fruits. As an afterthought, I should probably plant them later, I just did not expect them to grow so fast.

Sey purple tomatilos are supposed to be better tasting then the green tomatilos. I'll update about them if I get any fruits. Long time ago when I lived in Russia I grew the other variety, called Candy, it was yellow when ripe and mildly sweet, without any sourness in them. I recall that they were very productive even in the cold summers.

I would have to strongly disagree with that blanket statement jimmy. My tomatoes are all in the 3 to 5 foot range. And I did not do any special season extending.

Sounds like good plants for this time of the year Peter but what variety?, But here in my area we never plant are tomatoes until 3rd week of May or Memorial weekend, I'm surprised if yours is planted earlier in NY, Now I did plant 2 Liberty tomatoes which are early type and they are 3 foot tall but other wise the ground is too cold to plant any earlier.

They were planted May 3rd, with earlier than usual cooperative weather (50% LFD is April 20th), started indoors the last week in March (which really was too early - I am lucky I had the cooperative weather.) I have a thread chronicling the whole thing... http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/2993293/tomatoes-and-eggplants-growing-fast?n=95

The biggest ones are Sun Gold, and Golden Rave (which is not an early variety.)

I grew some purple tomatilos last year after starting them from seed. They were very leggy since I don't have any proper seed starting gear, but its pretty hard to find tomatillos, let alone purple ones in my area, so I gave it a shot and planted them deep to deal with the leggyness. They grow very fast and vigorously, even in a shaded area.

However, as mentioned you HAVE to support them. They're not flexible like tomatoes, they're very fragile and will snap/collapse/fall over if you don't, and its hard to move them to a stake since they like to snap rather than bend like a tomato. Ours got well over 5-6 feet tall, so be prepared. You HAVE to have at least one other plant for them to polinate as well, unlike tomatoes they're not self-fertile, so you also likely need polinators. They flowered for a good while before fruit started to set.

The purple kind only turns purple where the fruit itself is directly exposed to the sun, so while they're in the husk they don't change color, they must split first, and even then its only the part of the fruit not under the husk.

I personally didn't enjoy the taste of them. Way to sour and bitter for me, an opinion shared by the other members of the house. Roasting them helped a bit but they were still very strong. I ended up making some salsa verde, but I generally had little interest in picking them and you can get a lot. I personally wouldn't grow again.

I also grew the Aunt Molly's Ground Cherrys (again started myself- for better or for worse). They were much smaller and took a lot longer for the fruit to develop. You really need to leave them until they actually fall off the plant (hence the name ground cherrys), which was a very slow process, but once they do they're actually quite tasty! I'm not growing any this year, but I would if in the furture if found some transplants.

Tomatillos are very tart, which makes them excellent in salsa verde. I also have a recipe that uses them with an avocado to make a variation on guacamole. I am in the very small minority of people who don't like avocado, but mixed with the tartness of tomatillo it was very, very good.

Tomatillos grow very big, and they grow like weeds because apparently that's what they are. They supposedly grow wild in Mexico. I thought they would be harder to germinate than tomatoes, but for three years in a row they've sprouted before my tomatoes via the wintersowing method so they're quite hardy.