The City of Winnipeg is busy at work spring cleaning. Street cleaners, lawn mowers, and soon flower planters will all be on the move.

Street cleaning began April 18 and one month in, most streets, back lanes, medians, and city parks have already received a sweep away of winter sand and litter. The rest of the street cleaning should be completed by Friday, weather permitting. The annual clean up costs around $6 million to operate and takes over 300 machines and about 500 workers. 

Ken Allen, Communications Officer with the City of Winnipeg Public Works Department explains, "We're going to be transitioning our crews into our summer operations which is road construction... we have many projects planned for this year. Over 150 road construction projects planned. And we're spending a record 105 million dollars on that this year, so it's going to be a busy construction season ahead."

Lawn mowing began this week as well with 175 mowers that will be mowing about 2,500 hectares of green space around the city such as athletic fields and parks. Each rotation takes between 10 days and 2 weeks allowing for anywhere from eight to twelve cycles a season.

The 34 employed City of Winnipeg gardeners will soon start their work around the city.

"The gardeners will start their planting starting next Monday." Allen describes, "they focus their initial efforts on the downtown area and also on our image routes which are your Pembina Highways, your Portage Avenues, your Main Street. The aim is to get Winnipeg looking clean and green for this summer. And of course, we have the Canada Summer Games coming up so we want to definitely have the city looking beautiful when all the visitors start to arrive in our town."

The hanging plants will also be going up starting in June. Planting sites include centre median planters on regional streets, and prominent planting beds on image routes in the city, Regional Park floral gardens, City Hall, Waterfront Drive and high visibility community and downtown parks garden beds. There are approximately 250 planting locations. The tropicals used in the planters are stored throughout the winter season in greenhouses so they can be reused from year to year.