COURSE UPDATE

           With temperatures in the upper 70's earlier this week it has been a great opportunity for some Fall golf at The Country Club of Scranton.  It has also been a good opportunity for the Green Department to get some work completed on the property.  We are continuing to Verti-cut and Topdress fairways.  We have also been able to aerify and topdress approaches and tees.  On Monday, November 3rd we will begin aerifying and verticutting the Old Course Greens.  This will be an aggressive process and will also be very time consuming.  The Fall's Greens, which were aerated a few weeks ago are being mowed today and have healed well, considering they were aerified in early October, will be available.   We are going to make a push to complete everything next week due to the impending lay-off of 90% of the Green Department staff.  The Old Course will remain open next week but it may be necessary to close a hole temporarily to complete the required maintenance.

         Next week you may also see a paving contractor on property doing some much needed improvements to our cart paths.  We will be concentrating our work on #2 and #15.  We will also begin stripping some tees throughout the property so they can be leveled and planted with new sod.  This process will take about a week to complete.  We will be using the sod that we remove from the tees to sod several damaged areas on the Old Course Fairways.

       As you can see there is still a great deal of work to be completed before the onset of Winter.  We have raised the height of cut on our greens to its highest height in the past seven years to prepare the greens for Winter.  We have also increased our fertilizer applications to prepare the plant for the Winter months.  We are doing everything possible to prepare our putting surfaces for what could be another Winter with below average temperatures.

Thank you,

Gregory Boring,
Golf Course Superintendent

Fairway Cultivation

 We are performing an aggressive verticut-cut process to the fairways.  Once they are cleaned up we will be applying approximately 300 ton of sand to the Old Course fairways.