Tertill Garden in a Box Bundle

Tertill is a compact and effective robot designed to weed your home garden. Round, short, and equipped with four wheel drive, its rugged weatherproof shell and large solar panel let it stay in the garden all season long, running on nothing but sunshine. Tertill helps ensure that nutrients, water and sunlight go to your plants—not weeds—without the need to haul mulch, put down plastic, or use chemicals.

The Tertill Garden in a Box set includes 10 varieties of non-GMO organic seeds from Johnny's Selected Seeds in Vermont, 50 grow bags, a sample garden plan and schedule to help you set up your new garden. It also includes 30 row guards, 30 plant guards, and 30 whacker string replacements.

Tertill doesn't pull up weeds by their roots—it prevents weeds from successfully growing in the first place. First, it eliminates pre-emergent weeds by disturbing the top layer of soil. This kills weeds before they even get a chance to sprout. Second, it eliminates sprouted weeds with a string trimmer that cuts them down as they grow. By attacking weeds every day, Tertill prevents photosynthesis from taking place. The energy-deprived weeds eventually exhaust their reserves and die before they get a chance to make seeds. This makes it easier for your desired plants to thrive without having to compete with weeds for nutrients, water, and space. The dead weeds even return nutrients to the soil to help your plants grow.

Best of all, Tertill is completely solar powered so, under normal circumstances, you'll never need to charge its battery. The solar panel collects energy even on cloudy days, and Tertill automatically operates on a reduced schedule during extended cloudy periods. Of course, if Tertill has been in the dark for so long that its battery is completely exhausted, you can always recharge Tertill via USB connection.

Tertill uses the height of a plant to identify weeds. As Tertill sees it, small plants are weeds, and big plants are crops. You can inform Tertill that a small plant is a crop by placing one of the provided plant guards around it and removing the guard once the plant is well established. Tertill also needs a small barrier to keep it within the garden—such as a garden fence, a wooden border, or any sort of edging that is three or more inches tall. Metal or wood barriers work better than plastics since they can be more easily detected by Tertill’s sensors.

Tertill is designed so that one robot can easily keep up with the weeds in a typical garden (about 100 square feet). In most cases a single Tertill will handle gardens up to 200 square feet, but the maximum size depends on local weather and weed types. Of course, you can always put multiple Tertill robots to work together to maintain larger gardens with no additional programming or setup required.