Moss Rose or Portulaca

I'm trying to figure out how to dead-head my plants! They are not exactly like a regular flower stem, so should I just pinch off the whole top?Like about an inch of stem under the soon
to be seed parts? Also , if the stem looses all its plumpy leaves, can I expect them to grow back or is this when I cut it back to let it grow again?

I have lots of Moss Rose and I never do anything to mine. It usually reseeds every year. I have mine intermingled with other plants and don't usually have the time to try to deadhead them all. Usually the dry seed head will just drop off on it's own in time.

I consider them self cleaning. Sometimes I give them a haircut mid summer if they are getting leggy.

I haven't been deadheading mine here in NY, and they seem to be doing fine. We grew them all over the place when I lived in Austin & Houston: I can't recall deadheading them there either.

I just read something the other day on dead-heading moss rose, new to me as well! I thought maybe thats why somedays I don't see any flowers and maybe thats why they get spindly on me. But yet a plant right next to it will be full of leaves and look quite healthy.I get more spindly than healthy. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong? I water according to what the label says.

When you say you water according to what the label says, what exactly was the label telling you? These don't need a ton of water, and depending on what type of soil you have you may not need to water them very frequently at all and depending on what they said on the label they could have misled you into watering more/less than it really needs (given that they don't need a lot of water, too much water is more likely than too little). Too much (or too little) water could cause them to be a bit spindly, or if they're not getting enough sun that could do it too--they love sun and heat. I've never deadheaded portulaca and they've always looked fine so it's not lack of deadheading that's making them that way.

Since I water them all the same , yet some are growing beautifully....I think I might go out at night and see if something is eating the leaves off of some of them. Beacause the ones that are spindly have lost their leaves. I'll get this figured out if it kills me!

It's definitely worth checking for something munching them, but I wouldn't rule out a watering issue just because some plants are doing fine. (Dropping leaves can also be a symptom of watering issues) Watering everything the same is only good if everything about the plants and their conditions are also the same. If they're in the garden, could be one gets a little more/less sun, a little better/worse drainage, or the soil is sloped a little different for one than another. Some of these differences can also happen in pots. Plants can always tolerate some range of varying conditions, so if you're somewhere in the middle of that range then you can treat everything the same and the majority of your plants should be just fine, but if you're borderline one way or another on amt of water, sun, etc, then those slight variations in the conditions that one plant is in vs another can be enough to make a difference. Or sometimes for a variety of reasons, when you plant things in the spring some plants will get established better than others, and those will thrive and grow like crazy, but the ones that didn't get established as well will struggle once the weather gets warm (maybe they were more rootbound coming out of the nursery pot, or you damaged more roots during transplanting, or didn't do quite as good a job teasing the roots apart, etc).

i deadhead mine all the time. i just pinch of the dead flower at the very tip. it flowers alot better on the days i do this.

Sometimes spindly plants are planted to thick. Mine was skinny till I put it in a pot in MG pottingsoil. Now it's jumpin'!