Courgettes - should spent male flowers be removed as soon as they fold up and wilt?

Also, should they be cut off with scissors or a knife, or just broken off? (in other words does it need to be a clean cut for some reason?).

Finally, where to make the break/cut? Just behind the flower head or near the end of the flower stem where it's joined to the plant's main stem?

 

Narr, just leave them on, they make no difference, they drop off anyway..
Some people eat them, but dont ask me for a recipe

 

I've noticed that courgette plants tend to produce more male flowers early on, and it doesn't seem to matter what you do, you can't speed up the production of female flowers and the courgettes that follow.

Like Pete said, some people eat them. I have a simple recipe for them, but I've never bothered because it seems utterly pointless. The recipe says to paint them with beaten egg, dip them in flower, then fry them to make courgette flower fritters. I've never bothered, because to me, that's pretty much just batter and little else.

 

Yes male flowers always come first.

 

Thanks all. I have a number of young plants right now and it's only over the past few days that they've started flowering. Mostly producing male flowers but a few female too (four so far) so I've been fertilizing manually using a very small and soft paintbrush.

As an aside, today another female flower opened but there were no newly opened male flowers so I've been salvaging pollen from some of yesterday's closed flowers in the hope that will work. We'll see.