What an awesome goal,
@beckygardener, and you are in good company around the country - there are many people working on that goal, but at the same time, never enough of them.
I'll even say that I think your rusty fans are especially helpful to people who take daylilies very seriously - you might discover helpful ways to choose and blend cultivars by knowing which ones fare worst, may survive or even quickly overcome their rust, and which ones resist rust in your garden altogether. When rust is suppressed or non-existent, there is no way to know how the pod and pollen parents would perform on their own, or how the offspring might fare once you have a set of seedlings.
I'm also at the point, with just 200 cultivars, of needing to get serious about culling so that I can continue on with my own similar goal. In the past I've done this "by the book" based on stats that reflect what I thought might fit best in my mix, even by how quickly a new fan blooms true to type. Now that I have so many that meet my basic criteria, I think I will just try to figure out which I could not imagine losing from the garden, and let my eyes do this one next round of fan-reductions. I worry that I'll miss some big-picture reasons why I should keep them all, or not give away the "cull-ees" ... but I've got to learn to trust the foundation of data and observation that has led me this far, and work on reducing the group from an esthetic point of view for this one summer.
Have you decided how you will make your own reductions?
