I remove the flowers from my pepper plants until the plant itself is large enough to support a much larger crop. Precocious plants like peppers will set a single fruit on a small plant....and then won't grow much or do much else. By removing the initial flowers, my plants focus on foliage and structure, and then set tons of peppers almost overnight.

I'm with you, Mike. I rarely pick-off the flowers from any plant. Most plants know what they are doing and shed what they don't want/need/are ready-for... if they are well-card-for. Dying plants will try to flower and produce progeny.

Unfortunately, I didn't cull any of the baby fruit from my Aprium this year and I had a tree full of small fruit. It still tasted wonderful.

Picking flowers off trees??!! Seems labor-intensive. I’ve never heard of that.

I think a lot of it comes from confusion about annuals vs. perennials because, with some true annuals, it's possible to prolong the life somewhat by removing the blooms. Annuals die after blooming, so some people seem to get the mistaken idea that removing the bloom means the plant won't die.

There are monocarpic plants that live for quite a few years before blooming and then die after blooming. They usually produce offspring before blooming, so the fear of losing a plant because of blooming should be eliminated if there are offspring present.

Some blooms smell bad, so they might be removed for that reason.

A lot of it seems like vengeful busywork that people who couldn't get their plant to bloom at all invented, control freaks, &/or those who just want to seem like they have some secret info to share. So often I see people say if Coleus blooms aren't removed, the plant will die. Totally not true.

I more of a believer that struggling plants don't have the pep needed to produce a bloom. Not much of a believer that many, if any, plants bloom because they are dying. I've never witnessed what I thought was a case of that.

When plants are growing wild in their native habitat, nobody fusses over them and they do fine without us messing around with them.

Littlebug, in my case, the Aprium flowers and then sets fruit; then I go out and shake the tree to knock off a lot of baby fruit; this allows the remaining fruit to get larger. Growers actually go out and hand cull the fruit to only one fruit per bunch. Or else you end up with this:

I rarely have to cull bunches from any of my citrus - occasionally the Meyer, but then rarely.

CA Kate, that makes sense. When the OP said trees, my midwestern mind pulled up catalpa trees, which are common flowering trees in my area. De-flowering them sounds impossible!

Commercial apple orchards thin blossoms with chemicals any time from bloom to a couple weeks after bloom.

Thinning Apples Chemically