Mowers, start your engines: Canberra mowing season underway

While the grass may not be as green and as long as it normally would, city mowing coordinator Terry Mcleary said the team will still be up in the early hours of the day to keep the city beautiful.

"Normally it's a lot more busy than what it currently is but as everybody in Canberra would be aware, it's actually been a mild winter and in fact quite cold and very little rainfall," Mr Mcleary said.

"A lot of people don't see our staff, they're out there from anytime from six o'clock - sometimes earlier doing road works or picking up rubbish in town and the rest of it to make it clean and beautiful for the coming day."

Last year's mowing season was the second wettest spring on record and the mild temperatures supported optimal grass growth. This season the grass growth has been limited.

Mr Mcleary said the mowing season is running about a month behind, compared to last year.

"It's been a dry winter - the grass is very, very brown and unless we get some moisture, it'll potentially be quite an easy season as far as mowing goes."

He said his fleet of 73 mowers, plus contractors work non-stop five days a week from about September to the end of April the following year. He said the only time they would not be cutting the grass was because of a lot of rain and frost.

"Rain does prevent us from mowing - for two reasons, one it causes the grass to clog up and the second thing is that it can get too wet and therefore the machine would do too much damage to the ground," he said.

"But besides that we're out in the cold, the only time you really don't mow is when it's frosty, cause it damages the grass. But as soon as the frost comes off we're out there mowing."

To assist in keeping the grass down, Transport Canberra and City Services is replacing aged mowing equipment with new mowers.

It will see the introduction of Trimax wide area mowers and the return of Kubota mowers into the 2017-18 mowing fleet to increase flexibility and efficiency.