Every gardener struggles with the chore of weeding. That’s why we’re always looking for that magic bullet to make weeding a little less taxing. The Tertill Garden Weeding Robot is an interesting Roomba-style invention to help gardeners with their most dreaded of chores. But a little planning has to go into your garden to maximize the usefulness of the Tertill.
Buy on Amazon: Tertill Garden Weeding Robot – A Better Way to Weed“Tertill is a solar-powered weeding robot that lives in your garden and weeds intermittently for a total of 1-2 hours every day. Its specially designed wheels churn up the top layer of soil preventing most weeds from sprouting. If any weeds do grow, Tertill chops them down with its string trimmer.
Proven as effective as hand-weeding by the Cornell School of Agriculture”
Tertill Garden Weeding Robot website
When I first started gardening I left a lot of space between plants. One quickly learns that the more space you have, the more weeds you have. I learned to densely plant my perennial beds with shrubs and flowers that cycle throughout the season and add companion plants to my vegetable and fruit beds. By the first day of summer, there is little open space that’s not in a weed-suppressing shadow from an adjacent plant. I also use compost to feed the soil food web and pine bark mulch to insulate the soil. With little space available to weeds, the effort of weeding is reduced considerably, especially if I can pull them when they’re small.
The Tertill Garden Wedding Robot is basically a Roomba for the garden. The Tertill website instructs that for optimal results, your garden soil should be level, free of obstructions (besides the plants), and bordered with brick or some other raised barrier to keep the Tertill from roaming out of your garden. The idea is that you let the Tertill kind of live in your garden bed where it will patrol for an hour or two each day, recharged by solar energy, and whack down small weeds as they appear (Tertill includes wire barriers you can place around seedlings to protect them). A very cool idea to say the least.
I put the Tertill to the test
Being the man I am, I ignored the directions on the website about creating ideal conditions – I wanted to discover its strengths and weaknesses.
When I unleashed Tertill in the raised garden bed that holds my blueberries, it had considerable difficulty due to the very light layer of soil (lots of peat moss and compost have been added over the years to the top layer). There are also some leftover cuttings from pruning my blueberry shrubs earlier. I left these obstacles in Tertill’s way intentionally – it was interesting to watch the weeding robot maneuver around obstacles, turn and head in the opposite direction. Pretty cool.
In spite of the conditions, Tertills’ specially designed wheels cultivated the top layer of soil, which is a good thing. It had some difficulty mowing down weeds with its string trimmer, but I let it alone and decided to come back later to see how it did. I also let it roam in my perennial beds without edges and it did a pretty good job of turning around when it encountered lawn. But it had difficulty maneuvering between my lilac and coral bells – it dug itself into a hole. In my strawberry bed, it did much better as the Tertill apparently found it easy to navigate between the strawberry “hills”.
Tertill App
Tertill offers an app for iPhone and Android that connects via Bluetooth to your weeding robot. It’s necessary for downloading software updates to your Tertill, to check its operating status, and to check out help documents like a quick reference for what the various patterns of LED lights mean.
Conclusion
I hadn’t expected much from Tertill. I didn’t create an optimal garden bed for it and only cleared out a few errant stones and twigs. But I figured I’d “set it and forget it” and see what happened while I worked on giving it a “meh” review. When I checked on the garden bed 4 days later, I was astonished at how many weeds the Tertill had indeed cut down, just as promised. See the before and after pics below.
Naturally, this only works if you give the Tertill enough space to do its business. In my perennial beds, which are densely planted, I wouldn’t expect these results, nor would I want them. But in a vegetable bed, it can be quite a time saver. I’ll probably let it run over my pepper and tomato beds before planting just so I don’t have to fuss with the weeds and can do something else. Like lay in my hammock.
Tertill weeding robot before
Great info!! Thanks for sharing this article.