Sun Joe Corded Electric Garden Tiller & Cultivator with Steel Tines, 16 Inch, 12-Amp Motor - Heavy-Duty Tilling Machine for Lawn, Yard, and Gardening Care, TJ603E

I bought the Sun Joe because I wanted a light tiller I could use on three raised beds used for vegetable gardening with a total area of 100 square feet. Each bed is surrounded by a 3 foot rabbit fence so double digging with a shovel would have been difficult. The tiller arrived mostly assembled, all I had to do was position the handle and tighten it, and then telescope the handle to the right length. The tiller is quite light, feeling lighter than it's advertised 10 pounds. I have three 4 x 8 raised beds. Each one I had added composted manure that I needed to till in. One bed had just straight dirt, the second one had some spring wheat growing in it, a couple of inches tall. The third had last year's crab grass thickly matted (and dead) and I knew that one would be tough. The tiller handled the first bed with just dirt and manure easily. I found it was easy to drag the tiller slowly backwards and it would dig in anywhere from 4 to six inches, depending on how much you wanted to work it. The second bed, with some spring wheat growing in it, was a little tougher because the 5-7 inch roots would get mulched and stuck around the tines. I stopped tilling twice, unplugging the unit to clear the roots and mud clinging to the tines. The third bed was an even tougher job, and I had to move along much more slowly, again having to turn the tiller off and unplug it to clear the tines of roots and matted crabgrass material getting stuck and wound around the tines. All told, however, the unit worked very well. I was able to till three beds in about 10-15 minutes. If I had to double dig those beds, it would have been 1.5 hours of tough shoveling. I think this unit is fairly reliable. I put my hand on the motor and it was only slightly warm after five minutes of tilling without stopping. It's generally heat that kills off a motor but if you use this motor in the coolest part of the day and take a break here and there every 5-10 minutes, the motor should last a long time. The power of this unit is just adequate for the job. Any more powerful, and a lot of dirt would have been knocked out of the beds. This one knocks a little dirt of the beds but not bad because tilling tends to throw soil around. I probably would not use this tiller if I was planning to create a 1,000 square foot garden by breaking up lawn sod. Definitely look for a a unit that's 8-10 amps or gas powered for that sort of job. However for tilling small beds of soil that haven't been heavily compressed this unit does the job. It's fairly good for raised bed gardens.

Wonderful machine and the company and it's distributors stand behind their product and offer excellent customer service. Over the years I have purchased a couple Sun Joe products and have always been happy with them, so when I needed a new tiller, I went with Sun Joe and I'm glad I did. This machine has a lot of power, yet is not unmanageable. It has various settings to allow you to dig deep into the soil, or just scrape the surface for things like seeding. I was using the tiller on the deepest setting to dig a vegetable garden from scratch. The tiller dug deep down on the first pass and totally turned the turf, mulching it up as I went. Then "BOOM", I hit a rock, and then another one, in all honesty, the tiller took a pretty significant beating but kept on working. Apparently however, the beating took it's toll, and eventually, the tiller assembly sheared off. Again, it took a beating before getting to that point. I notified the distributor SpreeTail through Amazon and they were extremely responsive. I admitted to them that I had hit some rocks, but they didn't seem to care. They immediately started the process for me to return the tiller free of charge and they replaced it with a brand new one. In all honesty, I think my tiller endured more than the normal wear and tear covered by the warranty, but within a week of sending it back, I had a brand new tiller. I will be much more careful with this one, starting at a lesser depth so that I am not surprised by big rocks buried deep underground that the blade encounters full on. Bottom line, I recommend this tiller and Sun Joe products without hesitation. This thing is a power house and gets the job done... Just be more careful than I was and should have been.

Overall, this is a good tool at the right price. I just used it for several hours in a row on the hardest dry clay I can imagine (I literally had to work for several minutes with a hammer and chisel to clear clumps from the blades the few times it got jammed up), and it worked quite well. It did take some time and technique on the extremely hard, dry clay, but I imagine it would make short work of any other soil situation, and I probably could have saved some time by hosing down the clay a bit first. Assembly was quick and easy, and although you should read the manual and understand the hazards of a tool designed to tear stuff up, operation is pretty obvious. I was also careful to use an appropriately sized extension cord. There are two problems with this tiller: By far the biggest one is the design of the handles. The part you hold is a round cylindrical shape oriented pointing away from you, and the motion of the blades makes the tiller pull in exactly that direction, so it is very difficult to hold the round handle without your hands sliding to the back of the handles, which makes you fingers slide off of the trigger that keeps it running, so it turns off. I almost immediately gave up trying to use it as designed, and duct taped some blocks of wood inside the backstop of the handles so my hands wouldn't slide back off of the trigger. I was surprised how well that worked for such a simple solution. The second problem is in how the manual says to route an extension cord to it. There is a small square hole in the handle back, with a hook inside the handle area. The manual say to form a loop in the exentension cord (which is not included btw) and use the hook to grab the cord. However, never have I seen in my whole life an extension cord designed or able to be bent at such a sharp angle as would be required to pass a loop through the tiny square hole. Furthermore, when I tried to ignore that hole and just pass the cord through the handle to at least use the hook, the hook was such a tight fit on my 12-gauge (with ground, which is not needed for this two pronged, double insulated device) extension cord that I think it may have damaged the extension cord.

The rototiller, thankfully, came in the color black. A nice sturdy looking color as opposed to lime green. It handles the ground beautifully. I did have a sun Joe full size rototiller, and that actually landscaped a large part of my yard. So I know that the brand is sturdy, and this little beast proved it today. It does not seem to clog up with weeds, but it does catch stones so you'll have to look to see if you caught a stone, if it is not turning. Dislodge the stone, and this thing keeps going. I'm really happy with it, and I seem to have gotten it at half price, $110 Canadian. This rototiller helps me get rid of weeds in the middle of rows that a full scale rototiller could not delicately do. My garden now looks attended to, instead of abandoned. In addition to gardening, I also bought it for a trench digger, laying internet cables in the lawn for surveillance cameras. It is wide enough for laying internet cables, or power lines, such as an outdoor outlet. Although you will need to go at a depth that is safe, it will handle digging trenches and gardening weeds. I'm really really glad that I bought this. And after 3 years of having their rototiller, and passing it off to a family member, I know that this will last. I couldn't be happier knowing that I can go out in my garden, and weed without getting my hands green and dirty. In addition, between the rows of potatoes, it will actually hill your potatoes if you toss up freshly dug dirt. It will aerate the soil, and take the surface part of the weeds out. You don't necessarily have to go too deep near the plants, but it does do a fantastic job of weeding.

Me gustó su potencia, es ms fácil dar tierra cuando riegas unos 2 días antes de usarlo más fácil para el equipo y menos cansado para el operador .... Muele las hojas de los árboles no al 100 pero ayuda a iniciar el proceso de compostaje generalmente en de 15 a 30 min me llevo darle tierra a cada árbol... Yo lo ame me ha servido mucho

merci

Muy buen producto, trabaja muy bien, trabajamos en un jardín como de 500 m2 y en 2 días lo terminamos, mucho muy fácil el trabajo con este aparato

I would have given this a 5 star review, but the first one I got worked extremely well for 10 feet only and then would not start again. There was no problem returning and the second one is working well - crossing my fingers it continues to do so.