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.

This is a lightweight rototiller, if it hits something hard (like a rock) it will jump a bit. I expected this, so I'm not disappointed by that. The ground I tilled is hard and this rototiller worked through it very well. It is everything I hoped it would be. Well worth the price.

This is my second Sunjoe electric tiller. I bought the first one years ago and it is still running but the handle rusted out mostly due to my neglect. I basically left it out all the time. Which means this is an amazing machine. It is not a very deep tiller but you can make several passes if you want deeper tilling. I personally don't like to till deeply in an effort to save the soil biota. What it does supremely well is chew through weeds and grass. It is best to mow a new area as low as possible before you start to avoid having to unwind long stems from the blades. I am a healthy 67 year old female and I find the machine very manageable. I

So this is now the 3rd Sun Joe tool I've purchased. I also own their 40V battery electric push mower and their 2000+psi electric pressure washer. My expectations were low on the first two products as they were electric and not as much of a "name brand" as others. However I was pleasantly surprised with the performance of both of those. So this time around, I had much higher expectations of electric tools from Sun Joe. To say I was impressed would be an absolute understatement. I've used large gas tillers/cultivators growing up to turn over a decent size garden so I wasn't expecting anything close to that. However, this 16" beast blew me away and performed MUCH better than the old gas ones I was used to. I had 3 specific projects in mind for it, a small stone-lined bed for strawberries alongside my garage, a larger area that used to be a dumping area for grass/leaves, and a larger area to loosen up soil so we could level the area for a playset. This performed exceptionally for all 3 tasks. For once I avoided Murphy's Law and the tiller was the perfect width for the strawberry bed. That was done in less than 5 minutes and probably could have been quicker if I didn't encounter a few large rocks that I had to dig out. Smaller rocks (about the size of a deck of cards) were no match for this tiller and came out easily making it simple to rake them out. The dumping area I had expected to take a few hours, but finished up in less than 20 minutes. I even hit some large branches that were buried under old leaves and they simply got stuck in the tines (locking up the tilling blades) so I stopped, pulled it out, and kept going. Didn't bend or damage anything, even though these branches were about 2" thick! The playset area again I expected to take hours, but was able to do the few smaller high spots in 30 minutes and have it leveled out in under an hour. My wife who was out running errands came home and asked how far I had gotten and I just smiled and said "Done!" If you're debating getting this one, just stop and order it already. Grab a decent power cord (I bought a 100' 12/3 one with lighted ends now) so you don't end up chaining them like I had to for one area and you'll be good to go! I'll definitely consider Sun Joe for my next electric power tool purchase, although I think my expectations will be even higher!

Works great in our hard, rocky Arizona soil. Used in an elevated planter, great in a smaller space. It was light enough to pick up and place in the planter.

This is a GREAT tiller! We were hesitant about purchasing it because our soil is so rough, however this little machine packs a huge punch! To say this machine is worth the money, is an understatement! If it can handle my husband, it can handle anything! He is pretty rough with machines & tools. You just need to be mindful of any weeds getting wrapped around the tines. My husband even hit a big rock & this thing kept right on! We just knew it was broken but to our surprise, it wasn't! We are very surprised by the quality of this machine! Very happy with our purchase! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND this! We live in the harsh, rough, south. In the deep country where the terrain is very rough. If this little machine can withstand this soil, then I'm sure it can handle any soil! We tilled a good size area. It's about a 600 square ft area that this mighty machine worked. If you let the machine do the work instead of YOU trying to do it, it's such a breeze! Should we need to purchase another one, we will definitely be buying this one again! The only complaint we have is we wish it was taller!