Sun Joe TJ599E Aardvark 2.5-Amp Electric Garden Cultivator

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.

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.

It's a lightweight item, but it fulfills its mandate. Works well. Jams a bit too easily but easy to clear as long as you are careful.

OMG! Best tool ever! If I could give it 6 stars I would! This tool just did in 5 minutes what it took me several days to do by hand last spring when I prepared neglected beds for new azaleas. My neighbor loaned me his electric tiller but it was so big and bulky, it was impractical for small space gardening. I’m 67 years old and consider myself strong, but this made clearing a 3’ x 12’ strip of hardened clay soil in an existing bed so easy. I love that it’s very lightweight, fits in small spaces so I could till hard soil without risking damage to the roots of existing shrubs. I do recommend watering hardened clay soil overnight as instructed before using it. I soaked the soil. The instructions say not to use over thick roots, stumps, and rocks, but it cut right through old dead roots that were choking out my plants. DOWNSIDE: Now that I can do this in an hour instead of days-long back breaking work, I will probably spend a small fortune next spring putting in new beds!

I bought this product "Sun Joe TJ599E Electric Garden Cultivator, 6.3-inch, 2.5-Amp, Adjustable Shaft" to perform small-scale tilling operations on my three small raised gardens, hoping that its small size and light weight would make it easier to perform the tasks of soil-loosening (tilling) and the mixing in of compost and mulch. The majority of reviews I read on Amazon made me think that this product could do the job, however I was still mindful of those other reviews that stated the product had insufficient power. The product was apparently shipped directly from the seller (Spreetail), not from Amazon's own warehouse. As it happened, it arrived by FedEx just as I had finished spreading a couple inches of peat moss across the tops of the three gardens, on top of the first few inches of garden soil that I had already loosened with a garden spade. I inspected the product, read the few pages of the manual that were in English (unusually, they were fairly well written in clear English). I adjusted the handle and the telescoping 'boom' or shaft, and connected the power cord. The trigger requires that the user press an 'unlock' safety button, which I did, and the product's motor ran and the 'tines' rotated as expected. But when I lowered the tine head to contact the top of the peat moss/soil, the tines immediately stopped, although the sound and pitch of the motor did not change perceptibly, as if a clutch had been released. I raised the head a few inches and the tines resumed rotation. I worked for perhaps five minutes, experimenting with how much down pressure could be applied and how deep the tines could be in the loose soil before they would stop, and the answer was that I could have stopped them by holding a pencil in their way. They essentially had enough power to rotate in the air, but not enough power to do anything useful. I called the "contact us" phone number listed on the user's manual, and was rewarded with 20+ minutes of loud, raucous 'music' before somebody came on the line. She seemed to have no actual knowledge of the product, and seemed to just be looking things up. After I described the problem, she seemed nonplussed (unperturbed), as if people call about this problem all the time. She suggested that I could have them send me a replacement unit, or return it to Amazon. By this, I concluded that they are quite aware of this issue. Nothing was offered in regard to applicability of the product to my application, which I had described to here. So, I initiated a return/refund request through Amazon, but had to send the unit back to the seller rather than to Amazon. Besides the product not working adequately, I can offer the following observations: - The plastic parts are cheaply made and had mold-flashing along the edges; one rarely sees such roughly made plastic parts these days. - From the sound made when I rotated the times by hand (easily done, by the way, and with the power cord disconnected), it seems that a set of gears (probably plastic ones) connect between the electric motor and the tines' shaft. - The telescoping handle worked adequately and did not slip back under use that way that some other reviewers have reported. - The left-hand handle (the other handle, with the trigger, is clearly designed to he held by the right hand) has a cheap and roughly designed angle adjustment. A knurled knob needs to be backed WAY off, and then the handle tugged forcefully into a new position before re-tightening the knurled knob. - The tines are only something like 2~3 inches long, so (power aside) this product can't be used to till deeply. - This product is variously referred to as 'tiller' and a 'cultivator'; those terms don't mean the same thing, and the design of the product makes 'tiller' the more appropriate name. The user COULD pull the tines between rows of plants to do some 'cultivating' (removal of weeds), but the description of the product's operation in the manual seems to be more about 'tilling'. In order to 'till', this product would need to have a much more robust drivetrain, even in shallow soil that is free of heavy clay and such.