I have never removed blooms from small plants of any kind. I have heard that straw berries should no bloom after transplanting for 3 months or so.
I have pepper plants that were plant 4 inches deep & are only 8 inches high & have very small fruit on them.

Peppers will ever-bear rather well without slowing down too much. You can pull a "ripe" pepper once the color starts to show and it will ripen fully on it's own.

I only remove flowers/peppers that hang so low the pods would drag the ground once they formed. It's not necessary to do that, but it's something I do.

Let them alone! Let them grow! LOL Nancy

I do agree with them. I never pluck or remove any flowers in my peppers. Better let the nature do it's course.

Adam

As for the tomatoes, you should probably be able to feel the tomato already forming...just lightly squeeze the base of the blossom.

I don't know if you're supposed to or not, but I had one that did that and I messed with it and the petals slid right off. I peeked inside it and there's a teeny little tomato already forming.

I pinch the first blossoms on the top of my peppers. I think that this promotes more blossoms overall.

Why not have some fun and do a little experiment this year?

Pinch the buds off of one of them and compare to the non-pinched plants. Keep records of total peppers produced and quality and size. Heck, some folks go so far as to cut the tops off their young pepper plants in hopes of promoting "better" pepper plants.

I like to do this with one of my tomato plants every year to see if I can get a big mater. I have limited success, but it's kinda fun.

Basically pepper plants have not been over-bred like grapes have been, they typically do not overset or set too early for the plant to handle, and in the off-times they do they just abort the fruit.

Pepper plants know what they're doing and won't over-exert themselves. They're safe to leave to their own devices.