What to Do in Encino on Sunday: Farmers Markets and More

Ask a longtime Encino resident when "the farmers market" happens and you'll get a confident answer. Ask a second resident and you might get a different one. Both will be right, because Encino doesn't have one farmers market. It has two, and they operate on entirely separate calendars, in different corners of the neighborhood, run by different kinds of organizations for different reasons.

That split isn't a coincidence or a scheduling accident. It's the result of two markets that grew up serving different purposes, and once you see how they fit together, along with a 177-year-old adobe that only opens its gates for one specific hour each month and a new restaurant that just filled a gap on Ventura Boulevard, the shape of an Encino weekend looks a lot more deliberate than it first appears.

The Sunday Market Isn't Technically In Encino

The market most people mean when they say "Encino Farmers Market" sits at 17400 Victory Boulevard, between Balboa and White Oak, in the Sepulveda Basin. The mailing address is Van Nuys. It's run by ONEgeneration, a nonprofit senior services organization, and every Sunday from 8am to 1pm, rain or shine, more than 30 farmers set up alongside 25-plus food vendors and about 10 crafters. There's live music most weeks, a fish monger, a butcher selling grass-fed beef and bison, and enough bakeries and prepared-food stalls that you could make a full breakfast out of the walk from one end to the other.

The market accepts EBT and WIC, and a share of every dollar spent there goes toward ONEgeneration's programs, including meals delivered to homebound older adults in the San Fernando Valley. That's not incidental branding. It's the reason the market exists in its current form: it was built to fund senior services first and sell produce second, which explains why it has stayed in the same Sepulveda Basin lot with the same nonprofit backing for years while other Valley markets have moved, closed, or changed hands.

The Saturday Market Is A Different Animal Entirely

A day earlier and a couple of miles south, a different market runs on Ventura Boulevard itself, at 16206 Ventura near Woodley Avenue. This one, operated by Hello Farmer LLC, runs Saturdays from 9am to 2pm, according to the state's own certified farmers' market registry. It's a commercial operation, not a nonprofit fundraiser, and the vendor fee structure reflects that: stall costs run higher than at Hello Farmer's other Valley locations, which points to a market built around a more curated, boutique vendor mix rather than volume produce sales.

Here's the comparison side by side:

If you've been treating these as the same market with a flexible schedule, you've actually been missing one of them every week. If Sunday mornings are already spoken for, Saturday on Ventura Boulevard has been running the entire time.

Why The Split Makes Sense Once You Know The History

The Sunday market's roots go back to a nonprofit mission that predates most of the newer commercial market operators now working the Valley circuit. ONEgeneration built its market as a fundraising and community engagement tool tied directly to senior services, which is a fundamentally different business model than a for-profit market vendor network. That's part of why it has stayed anchored to the Sepulveda Basin site rather than chasing more visible Ventura Boulevard foot traffic. The mission was never really about location. It was about proceeds.

Hello Farmer's model runs the opposite direction. As a company that operates multiple weekly markets across the Valley, including a Wednesday market in Sylmar, it makes sense for the Encino version to land on Ventura Boulevard itself, where Saturday morning foot traffic from the boulevard's shops and restaurants can carry the market rather than requiring residents to make a special trip to the basin.

Neither market is trying to be the other. That's the part worth remembering.

The Third Sunday Has A Second Act

Two miles south of the Sunday market, near the corner of Balboa and Ventura, sits Los Encinos State Historic Park, home to the original de la Osa Adobe built in 1849 and the two-story stone Garnier building constructed not long after. The park sits on the site of Siutcanga, a village inhabited by Tongva, Chumash, and Tataviam people for thousands of years before Spanish contact, drawn by the same natural spring that still feeds a guitar-shaped pond Eugene Garnier dug in 1874.

Most of the year, the park is a quiet stop. But on the third Sunday of the month, it hosts Heritage Days from 1pm to 3pm, with confirmed 2026 dates running through September 20, October 18, November 22, and December 20. Look at the timing closely and the coincidence is hard to miss: the Sunday farmers market wraps up at 1pm, the exact hour Heritage Days begins two miles away. On the right Sunday, a market visit and a walk through the adobe fit into the same late morning without either one feeling rushed.

The park also runs free guided History Walking Tours on select Fridays throughout the year, though there's a practical detail worth knowing before you go on any day: there's no parking lot. Visitors park on Moorpark Street, one block before Ventura, and enter through the gate on foot.

Ventura Boulevard's Newest Table Closes The Loop

If the day starts with produce and ends with history, Ventura Boulevard has recently added a reason to stay out for dinner too. Popular, the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, opened this year at 18047 Ventura Boulevard in a 4,000-square-foot space with a full dining room, an eight-seat bar, and a patio. The menu leans into Mediterranean fusion with a sushi program built alongside it, and the restaurant runs Sunday through Thursday from 11:30am to 11pm, with a later Saturday format starting at 8pm.

It's a small addition in square footage but a real one in terms of what Ventura Boulevard didn't have before in that exact spot: a Mediterranean-forward dinner option with a bar built for staying a while, open on the same Sunday evening that started with a farmers market table and an adobe tour.

The Weekend Was Always There, Just Split Across Two Days

None of this required anything new to be built. The Sunday market has been running for years. The Saturday market has been on Ventura Boulevard the whole time. Los Encinos has hosted Heritage Days on a predictable monthly cycle. What changes once you map it out is how deliberately the pieces line up, from a market's closing hour matching a park event's opening hour to a Saturday market and a Sunday market operating two miles and one day apart without ever really competing for the same visit.

Knowing a neighborhood well enough to see these patterns instead of just its categories is part of what makes living here feel less like a series of errands and more like a rhythm you've figured out. If you're weighing what else that kind of local read on Encino can tell you, from the pace of a specific block to the character of a specific street, Sally Greene has spent years mapping exactly this kind of detail across the neighborhood. Let's Connect.