This battery-powered Greenworks tiller is perfect for your home garden – despite having a few quirks

Ever since we moved into our new house with a bigger yard, my wife has been slowly upgrading and expanding our garden beds. We're now at the point where having a good powered tiller is essential for helping us prepare our beds for each new season.

I've gotten to try out a few over the years, and most recently, I put the Greenworks 80V 10" Tiller through its paces. It's easy to set up and use, and it was strong enough for our soft garden soil.

But the wheels wobbled a bit when driving it, which caused it to tip over a few times, and the limited cutting depth means it's not the best for bigger beds or thicker soil. Overall, however, it's a solid tiller that could be helpful for any home gardener as part of their essential gardening toolkit.

Specifications

Set up

There's a little bit of work to assemble the GreenWorks 80V 10" Tiller, but it's not too bad, and the instructions are clear. All told, it took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running.

The first thing I would do is plug in the battery so it can be fully charged by the time you're done assembling it. The first piece to attach is the wheel assembly. You slide the post into the slot on the back and secure it with a cotter pin. This is where you can set it to one of the three tilling depths to fit your garden.

Then you attach the tines to the shafts of the gear box. They are lettered A-D, which is important to note because they are designed to go in a specific order. There's a piece of felt that goes between the tines on each side, and they are secured with two more cotter pins at the end. You can also go with just two tines if you have a much narrower space you need to cultivate, which is a nice feature.

The last step is to attach the upper handlebar with the four bolts and wing nuts.

How does it cut?

Overall, I was quite impressed with the cutting power of this tiller. I took a couple of garden beds that had dried out a bit after a couple of weeks without any rain, and was able to till the dirt fairly quickly and even pull up the pine needles and some of the smaller weeds.

Some of the more stubborn beds took a bit longer, but I didn't have to come back through them with a fork or anything afterwards. They were ready for new seeds and soil as soon as I was done.

The battery life also kept up quite well with my use. The longest stretch I used it was about 30 minutes across two larger garden beds, our side yard, and a smaller 16x6-foot garden bed in our backyard. It made it through the whole thing just fine, and the battery did recharge in about 30 minutes with the included fast charger.

There are a couple of things that bothered me about this tiller, however. The first was the wheels themselves. The whole wheel assembly would wobble quite a bit as I pushed it around the yard, so much so that it actually tipped over a few times. It seems like the bar on the wheels that attaches to the tiller body just doesn't fit as snugly as it should. Truth be told, I could probably deal with it for the few times a year I needed to use it, but it's quite annoying.

The other thing to be aware of is that there are only three different height settings for the wheels. That's not too bad, but there are other tillers in this price range that offer more variety of cutting depths for whatever you might need to plant. If you need to, you can technically take the wheels off entirely and still use the tiller, but that would make it harder to use, so I'm not sure if I'd want to do that.

H&G Verdict

Ultimately, this battery-powered cultivator from GreenWorks is a solid choice if you need help tilling your garden beds throughout the year. It has enough power to churn up most soil, and the quick recharging means you can keep going throughout the day. It sits about in the middle of residential tillers, and for what you get I'd say it's pretty good value.

If you have several large garden beds or need more options for cutting heights, then you should probably look somewhere else. But if you need a solid, reliable, battery-powered tiller, this is a good choice.

A tiller like this can make light work of digging your soil, and it will save you so much time compared to doing it by hand. As we know, time-saving kit is an essential in the garden, plus a lot of kit can have more than one use, which you can discover more about in our eye-opening feature on the unusual uses for a lawnmower.