Canberra’s seasons
How the Canberra climate runs a lawn year
Canberra has an oceanic climate with a cold winter, and it sits in the rain shadow of the Brindabellas, which leaves it with the third-lowest rainfall of the state and territory capitals and more than a hundred clear days a year. Frosts run from about May to September and the record low is minus ten, so the couch, kikuyu and buffalo lawns that make up most of the city go straw-coloured and stop, while tall fescue on shaded and south-facing blocks keeps growing slowly and wants the odd winter cut. Spring brings the wettest weeks of the year in September and October, the soil finally warms past the mid-teens, and everything wakes at once — the time to feed and to sort out the winter grass. Summer is thunderstorms between October and April, hot north-westerlies, the occasional afternoon easterly the locals call the Braidwood Butcher, and a record high of 44 degrees set in January 2020, all under permanent ACT water rules that keep sprinklers off through the middle of the day in the daylight-saving months. The autumn flush that follows is the season to lay turf, overseed or repair before the frosts return in late April, with the heaviest leaf drop of the year in the old inner suburbs.
We mow right across the inner south and central Canberra — Yarralumla, Kingston, Barton, Forrest, Deakin, Griffith, Red Hill, Narrabundah, Fyshwick, Symonston, Hume and Pialligo among them — and across the wider Canberra northside. Nearby? Ask and we will sort a local operator.
