Tamaki Urban Market Garden is a community-started urban farm on Elstree Avenue in Glen Innes, Auckland, tucked in behind the Elstree Avenue Family Doctors. It began in 2021 and grows vegetables and greens to connect local people with where their food comes from, support biodiversity and push back against climate change. Unlike a community garden, it also gives people paid work and teaches them to grow food on a scale productive enough to earn farmers an income.
The farm sells weekly vegetable boxes on a monthly subscription and gives its surplus produce to the Elstree Family Doctors, Point England School and the Faith Family Community. Volunteers come on Monday afternoons and Friday mornings, and there are monthly working bees and catch-ups. It works with the Glen Innes Family Centre backyard garden programme, The Recreators and Compost Collective. One customer praises the chemical-free produce and recalls that after Cyclone Gabrielle the garden still had salad when the supermarkets had almost none. The farm also invites local artists to show their work along its fence line.