Encino in Fall: Farmers Market, Dog Park, and Halloween Events

Ventura Boulevard gets the restaurant reviews and the ribbon cuttings. A few streets north, a stretch of Victory Boulevard puts a Sunday market, an off-leash dog park, and two Halloween parties within a short drive of each other.

The addresses tell the story before anything else does. The Encino Farmers Market runs out of 17400 Victory Boulevard. The Sepulveda Basin Off-Leash Dog Park sits at 17550 Victory Boulevard. That gap between house numbers is a couple of blocks, not a neighborhood away. Add the Encino Community Center, tucked into Encino Park one block west of Balboa Boulevard, and you have three of the places that structure an Encino weekend clustered in the same pocket of the neighborhood.

The Encino Farmers Market

The Encino Farmers Market has run every Sunday, 8am to 1pm, rain or shine, for long enough that vendors talk about watching regular customers' kids grow up between visits. It is operated by ONEgeneration, the nonprofit that runs its senior services campus at the same Victory Boulevard address, and a share of what gets spent at the market goes toward those programs, including homebound meals for older adults. Over 30 farmers, 25 food vendors, and 10 crafters show up most weeks.

What is actually on the tables changes with the calendar in a way that matters if you have been going all year without paying attention to the produce list. Summer is stone fruit, corn, and melons. What ONEgeneration lists for fall is different enough to notice: pumpkins, persimmons, apples, pomegranates, walnuts, and winter squash start replacing the summer stock. If your Sunday routine has been the same all year, the market itself is telling you the season turned before the weather did.

6.5 Acres and a Friday Morning Closure Worth Knowing

A hundred and fifty house numbers down Victory Boulevard, the Sepulveda Basin Off-Leash Dog Park covers 6.5 acres split into three sections: one for large dogs, one for small dogs, and a separate area for timid dogs and training. That kind of separation matters more than it sounds like it should. A 90-pound lab and a nervous 10-pound rescue do not need to share a fence line, and the park's own layout assumes they shouldn't.

The detail worth actually knowing before you drive over: the park closes every Friday from 6am to 11am for maintenance. It is easy to find that out the hard way, standing at a locked gate with a dog who was expecting a run. Outside that window, it is open sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, which makes it one of the few fixtures in Encino that does not answer to a posted set of business hours the way the shops on Ventura do.

Two Halloweens, Same Corridor

October brings two separate Halloween traditions to Encino.

The community center's event is municipal in a way that shows in how it's presented. It sits on a list with other recurring programming the center has run long enough to name and rename by theme year to year, this time as Haunt on the High Seas, alongside a costume contest built specifically for dogs. The Encino Village party is younger and grown from the ground up. It is only in its third year, organized by the people who live on those streets rather than by any city department, and it exists because someone decided the neighborhood wanted a costume night of its own before the official trick-or-treating started.

Both events depend on residents showing up, each offering a way to take part in Encino's October celebrations.

What This Means If You Live Here

If you already have a Sunday routine, the market and the dog park do not require any planning beyond checking the Friday closure window. They run year round on the same corner of the neighborhood.

October asks for a little more attention because there are two separate invitations instead of one. The community center's Halloween Carnival programming, including this year's Haunt on the High Seas and the dog costume contest, follows the center's own fall calendar, which is worth checking directly since city rec centers set specific dates seasonally rather than locking them to the same weekend every year. The Encino Village Block Party has already set its date at October 26. Between the two, a resident who wants both a dog in costume and a neighborhood street full of kids in costume gets two separate nights to do it, not one crowded event trying to be both.

The market, the dog park, and the two Halloweens are among the things that make an Encino weekend distinctive, with several of these local fixtures a few streets north of Ventura Boulevard.

If you're weighing what it actually feels like to live near this stretch of Encino, from a Sunday at the farmers market to a Friday morning that isn't dog park weather, Lori Morrissey knows this corner of the neighborhood well enough to walk you through it in person.