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I told Ern to do that.

When we have seedling we’ve grown ourselves or purchased, and they are still only around 8” tall or so, still not in the ground or in a pot and are producing blooms, those blooms need to come off.

We do it because that’s a sign that the plant is stressed out and not getting what it needs (as in, being in the ground!) and it thinks it’s gonna die, so it’s making fruit to propagate itself.

Once those blooms are pinched off and the plants are established in the ground or a pot, they can put their energy into root structure, and then they’ll shoot up, re-bloom at the proper time, and give you tomatoes or peppers or eggplant. (Usually it’s just peppers, tomatoes and eggplant that I do this to.)

Also - if you have a little plant with a big pepper or tomato on it, it’s more likely to break the stem due to the weight of the fruit. And - I’ve read that plants send out some sort of signal that bugs can hear when they are stressed, and the bugs zero in on those plants to finish them off! Eeek!

Anyhow, ‘scientists’ have done lots of studies, and no matter how ‘old’ you let a plant get before it goes into the ground, it doesn’t benefit them any more than if you had planted that 8” plant at the proper planting time for your zone.

Amazingly, the plants know exactly what to do! An 8” seedling will catch up to one that was planted at 12” in a mater of a week.