The best technology and gadgets for your garden this summer

From hot composters to outdoor TVs, our expert shares his top choices of the newest tech for your outdoor space.

Woman in gloves transplanting beautiful lavender plant into soil in garden

By Jonathan Margolis | Published - 4 Jun 2026

A hot composter wasn’t the most romantic present my partner could have given me for Christmas. It has no electronics, no app, nothing very exciting by my standards, just some rather wonky plastic panels that clicked together with some difficulty and a lot of swearing on my part.

Eighteen months on, though, I’m absolutely thrilled with the Indian-made Aerobin (1, RRP £199.99). The instructions were not great, but when you email the company for advice, a chap called Vincent – Aerobin’s chief operating officer, no less – comes back smartly with good, clear information.

So from Christmas onwards, I started piling in vegetable waste, mouldy fruit, fallen leaves, coffee grounds, weeds, bits of paper and cardboard, being careful to ensure no protein based gunge found its way into the mix.

I feared the local rodent population would start to get interested as our food scraps rotted away just by the kitchen door, but the Aerobin’s design seems to exclude them. It also nullifies any trace of bad smell, which was impressive.

What I didn’t see, though, was any worm action – or, indeed, feel any heat. There were clouds of busy fruit flies inside, so it seemed something was right. I regularly syphoned off the ‘leachate’ – or compost tea as it’s called – which is a kind of homemade Baby Bio.

This spring, I extracted my first compost and it was superb – fluffy, clean and odourless. I’m not sure what I did right, but I love it. The smallest, 200-litre version, at £200, was big enough for us as we don’t have a lawn or grass cuttings, but others will need bigger sizes.

The mentioned products arranged on a saga blue background and numbered — Stockists

My newest favourite garden gadget is a high-pressure washer from Germany’s Kärcher. The new K5 WCM FLEX eco!Booster HOME (2, RRP £379.99) is apparently 50% more powerful than previous models – just don’t do as I did and try to test how powerful the jet is with a hand.

It’s extremely painful. A fantastic machine with many, many uses, it’s especially good at rooting out weeds and moss from between paving stones. Kärcher models start at £219.

The garden gadget I’d most love to have for this summer, to watch the World Cup, Wimbledon and the Test series against New Zealand and Pakistan, is a garden TV. These come in full-sun and partial sun versions from a company called Sylvox (3) and, although they are pricey, you can get a 32- or 43-inch model complete with all the mounting accessories for less than £1,500. Good quality outdoor TVs are typically three times brighter than indoor sets – they are still quite new but have a growing number of enthusiastic owners.

Soil testing gadgets are another benefit of technology that wasn’t available to Percy Thrower’s generation. Professional models such as Atom Scientific’s pH tester cost £140 or so, but Chinese makers produce perfectly good alternatives. The Rootabest (4, RRP £16.32) measures plant moisture, pH, fertility, soil temperature, humidity and sunlight. Hard to go wrong, really.

Written by: Jonathan Margolis

Jonathan Margolis is a London and New York-based technology journalist. He has a global following for his column Landing Gear in the online publication Air Mail, appears regularly on the BBC and other networks and has won several journalism awards.

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