Ask a longtime Encino resident where to buy produce on the weekend and you'll get one answer: the Sunday market on Victory Boulevard, the one that's been raising money for ONEgeneration's senior programs for years. That answer used to be complete. It isn't anymore. Since Hello Farmer opened its Saturday market on Ventura Boulevard, the neighborhood has quietly split its weekend shopping into two separate systems that run on different days, different blocks, and different logic. Most people who live here are still only using half of it.
The Sunday Market Everyone Already Knows
The ONEgeneration-run Encino Farmers Market has the deepest roots in the neighborhood. It runs every Sunday, year round, from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, on Victory Boulevard between Balboa and White Oak. The market is certified, meaning the produce comes directly from California growers rather than resellers, and it carries a civic function beyond groceries: a share of every dollar spent there goes to ONEgeneration's senior services, including homebound meal delivery. Vendors selling grass-fed beef, honey, flowers, and baked goods fill out a market that reads more like a weekly institution than a retail pop-up. Locals who've shopped there for years talk about watching the same vendors' kids grow up behind the same stalls.
That's the market most Encino residents mean when they say "the farmers market." For a long time, it was the only one worth naming.
Saturday's Different Animal
Hello Farmer Encino changes that math. It runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 16206 Ventura Boulevard, near Woodley, and it's registered with the state as a certified market in its own right. But the format isn't a rerun of Sunday's model. Hello Farmer describes its own event as a street food festival as much as a produce market, leaning into prepared food vendors and a rotating cast of stalls rather than the fixed roster of growers who've anchored the Victory Boulevard market for years. It's a newer entrant on a different corridor of the boulevard, built around browsing and eating on-site rather than stocking a week's worth of groceries.
The distinction matters for anyone planning a weekend around it. Sunday is the market for filling a refrigerator and supporting a program with a decades-long track record. Saturday is the market for grabbing lunch and wandering a few stalls before the rest of the day starts. Treating them as interchangeable means missing what each one actually does well.
What a Full Weekend Looks Like Now
Put the two markets together and Encino's Saturday-Sunday rhythm looks different than it did even two or three years ago. A resident can now structure an entire weekend around outdoor programming that didn't used to overlap:
- Saturday morning: Hello Farmer on Ventura Boulevard for prepared food and a shorter, lighter market visit
- Saturday or Sunday afternoon: a walk through Los Encinos State Historic Park, where free Heritage Days programming runs on a recurring monthly schedule
- Sunday morning: the ONEgeneration market on Victory Boulevard for the actual grocery run
- Either evening: dinner along Ventura Boulevard's restaurant strip, now with a new entry in the mix
None of this requires leaving a five-mile radius. That's part of what makes the shift worth noticing. The neighborhood didn't add distant new attractions. It filled in a gap that was sitting in plain sight on the same boulevard.
The Adobe Most People Drive Past
Los Encinos State Historic Park sits just off the corner of Balboa and Ventura, close enough to the restaurant strip that plenty of residents pass it weekly without stopping. The park preserves the original nine-room de la Ossa Adobe, built in 1849, and the two-story limestone Garnier building that ranch owner Eugene Garnier put up in 1872, along with a natural spring-fed pond that's drawn settlement to the site for centuries.
What turns the park from a historical marker into an actual weekend stop is Heritage Days, a free program the park runs roughly once a month from 1 to 3 p.m. The remaining 2026 dates are September 20, October 18, November 22, and December 20. It's a low-key two-hour block of living history, not a ticketed event, and it's the kind of programming that only shows up on a calendar if you're already looking for it. Given how close the park sits to both farmers markets, it's an easy add to a weekend that already includes a stop on Ventura or Victory Boulevard.
A New Name on the Restaurant Strip
Ventura Boulevard's restaurant corridor added a notable entry in March 2026 when Popular opened at 18047 Ventura Blvd. It's the seventh concept from the Tel Aviv Restaurant Group, occupying a 4,000-square-foot space with a dining room, an eight-seat bar, and a patio. The menu, led by Executive Chef Dor Priezler, runs Mediterranean fusion with a seafood-forward lean, the kind of addition that gives the boulevard's dinner rotation a new option without displacing the older names that have anchored the strip for years.
For residents building a weekend around the two markets and the historic park, Popular slots in as an obvious dinner stop, close enough to the Sunday market's Victory Boulevard footprint and the Saturday market's Ventura Boulevard location that no part of the day requires much driving.
The Physical Routine Underneath It All
Encino's outdoor infrastructure hasn't changed as dramatically as its market calendar, but it's worth naming precisely because it's what makes the rest of the weekend possible without a car. The Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area covers roughly 2,000 acres bordered by Burbank, Balboa, Victory, and Woodley, and Lake Balboa sits inside it as the most-used piece of that footprint. The paved loop around the lake runs 1.3 miles, takes about half an hour at a walking pace, and turns into the neighborhood's most photographed stretch each March when the cherry trees along its western edge bloom.
The Sepulveda Basin Off-Leash Dog Park, also inside the recreation area, gives dog owners a 6.5-acre space split into three sections, one for large dogs, one for small dogs, and a separate training area. It draws its heaviest crowds on weekends, which means anyone chasing a quieter visit does better arriving on a weekday morning instead. Between the lake loop, the dog park, and the historic park a short drive away, the basin does a lot of the work that keeps Encino's outdoor weekend routine from depending entirely on a car trip out of the neighborhood.
What This Actually Means for the Weekend
The headline here isn't that Encino got a new restaurant or that a park runs occasional programming. It's that the neighborhood's weekend shopping habits split into two distinct systems without much fanfare, and the split rewards residents who treat Saturday and Sunday as genuinely different occasions rather than two versions of the same errand. The Sunday market is the one built for provisioning and civic contribution. The Saturday market is the one built for a shorter, food-forward visit. Neither replaces the other, and treating them as redundant means leaving one of them unused most weeks.
That's the kind of detail that only shows up if you're paying close attention to how a neighborhood actually runs day to day, not just what shows up on a map. It's also the kind of granular, block-by-block knowledge that matters just as much when the conversation eventually turns to buying or selling a home here. Knowing which side of Ventura Boulevard a market sits on, or which month Heritage Days lands on, is a small thing. Knowing it consistently is what separates someone who lives in a neighborhood from someone who's just looked it up.
If you're weighing a move in Encino, or thinking about what your own home here might be worth in a market that keeps adding small, specific reasons to stay, Angela Waters can walk you through it with the same level of detail. Schedule a free consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
