Better to ask a stupid question than not ask and stay stupid:
After a flower blooms, I tend to try to mark whatever it does to produce seeds as “fruiting”. E.g. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41604061 gets marked fruiting bc it’s dispersing seeds. Is this correct? At some point does it get unreasonable, for example, trying to mark grass seedheads as blooming/fruiting?
I find it reasonable. For fruit, I go by the definition, “the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants formed from the ovary after flowering.” So fruiting would be having said structure.
For that example, it’s mature fruit and not developing fruit, which “fruiting” has me imagine. Given that limitation it’s perfectly adequate.
While we’re on the topic of the meanings of the word “fruiting”, a presence of mushrooms can also be referred to as a fruiting as they’re structures used to disperse spores, much like a fruit disperses seeds.
Most (if not all) fungi as observations on iNat are in “fruiting” form, so it’s not really helpful with regard to phenology.