any suggestions on treating/eliminating this would be so appreciated. I have 2 small dogs so it needs to be safe for them. Thanks!

DougSoCal,

Do you currently have rust on your daylilies, have you got any photos?

I assume from your user name that you are in a climate where at least some daylilies have green foliage year round? It makes a difference to whether rust is likely to survive winter and come back the following year (as a general rule of thumb this is in Zones 8 and warmer, sometimes zone 7).

How many daylilies do you have? If only a few then the approach may be different. A good general article on dealing with daylily rust was in the American Hemerocallis Society's "Daylily Journal" and you can read it as a PDF here:
http://www.daylilies.org/RustR...

Also the AHS's web site has a page on daylily rust here:
http://www.daylilies.org/ahs_d...

I'm sure others who deal with rust personally will offer some dog-safe suggestions, which I assume means you'd rather not use pesticides, including "organic" ones?

When it gets around 90 degrees, rust tends to back off and wait for cooler weather.

I've had good luck spraying with Green Magic (not Simple Green) that you can buy off Ebay or the Lily Auction.
This is probably the least toxic.

I try to water early enough that plants can dry off before going into the night.
Also plants that get early sun tend to have less rust than those getting morning sun later.

Adding minerals to soil (like Azomite) can help make plants stronger and more rust resistant.
High nitrogen fertilizers can flame rust. I try to use long lasting organic fertilizer.

I try to buy plants with good rust ratings.
I'm hybridizing for plants with good rust resistance too.

Not that you want to do this during bloom season, but you can cut the foliage back almost to the ground, and spray what is left with a 5% Dawn solution. (I have also tried Chlorox cleaner with bleach, which is a commercial kitchen type cleanser that comes in a spray bottle; it did not harm the plants.) This approach will give you relief for a little while, and should be pet safe. (The Dawn certainly should be; I'm not sure about the Chlorox, but I would think that any pets would avoid anything smelling of bleach.)

I did both of these things this spring, when the rust was spreading everywhere. Plants that looked absolutely horrid grew back in green and clean, but some of them get hit by irrigation and so (possibly because I did not treat every single plant in the garden) the rust may be starting to reappear in places.

Good luck to you; rust is a scourge.

Thanks everyone! I'm still figuring out how this site works. Posting photos here of the rust like Seedfork asked about. I'm in the Southern California area near Pasadena, CA., so I believe it is Region 7. Maybe the summer heat will help eliminate the rust. I'm finding that some of the flowers don't look like the photos the sellers post. Often close, but sometimes they seem to be misrepresentations. But overall I am loving these beautiful flowers and the nice folks that share that passion.

DougSoCal,
Excellent photos showing rust. I think a lot of times people have a few brown specks on their foliage and think they have rust, but your photo shows what rust actually looks like. I see what looks like a lot of broken leaves, and am wondering why? I would definitely be spraying those daylilies with at least a contact fungicide, and they would benefit from a systemic spray also. That is a pretty bad case of rust, I would have to pull those worst affected leaves and destroy them immediately, they are just spreading millions of spores I would think. When you pull the leaves pull them all the way off down to the base of the plant.