On August 8, the lawn at Constitution Park filled up one last time. Blankets went down at six the Friday before, the way they always do before a Summer Concert Series night, and by seven the four-Saturday run closed out with a tribute set built around Huey Lewis and the News. Food trucks worked the edges of the crowd. Then the folding chairs came home, the string lights came down, and the park went back to being what it is on an ordinary Saturday: quiet, mostly empty, waiting for eight in the morning.
That's when the other Saturday ritual in this part of Camarillo takes over, and this month it's the one worth paying attention to. The Camarillo Farmers Market has run on that same corner for 35 years, and it's about to lose one of its longest-standing vendors for good.
Two Clocks on the Same Lawn
Constitution Park runs on two very different schedules, and residents who only track one of them are missing half the story.
The Summer Concert Series, put on by the Pleasant Valley Recreation & Park District and the City of Camarillo, is a finite thing. Four Saturdays, one stage, a set attendance window that opens at 7 p.m. and closes by nine. This year's lineup ran June 27 through August 8, and once the last band load out, the series doesn't come back until next summer. The Camarillo Community Band runs its own separate July series on Thursday nights at the same park, conducted by a rotating cast of local high school music directors, which is a nice detail if you've ever wondered why the bandstand sees action outside the marquee concert dates.
The farmers market runs on the opposite clock. It doesn't pause for winter, and it doesn't build toward one big finale. It opens at 8 a.m. every Saturday, straight through winter, and organizers describe it as the only volunteer-run certified farmers market left in Ventura County. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A California Certified Farmers Market means every grower selling produce there has been inspected and approved by the county Agricultural Commissioner, and every food vendor has passed through Ventura County Environmental Health. It's not a craft fair with a few fruit stands. It's a regulated market that happens to be staffed entirely by people who volunteer their Saturday mornings.
The proceeds do something specific, too. Vendors pay a percentage of their sales as a space fee, and that money funds the grief and bereavement programs at Camarillo Hospice, a service of Livingston Memorial Visiting Nurse Association. Those programs reach close to 400 grieving family members a year, including students, and none of it costs the families anything. So the market isn't just where you get your Saturday produce. It's a fundraising engine that's been running quietly on the same corner of Old Town for three and a half decades.
The Stall That Won't Be There in October
Here's the part that changes the routine for a lot of regulars: My Sage Gourmet is leaving the market at the end of September.
The stall belongs to Carol Takakura, who makes garden-to-table seasonings, rubs, and marinades out of her own home kitchen. She's the kind of vendor a market like this is built around, someone whose product is genuinely small-batch because the batch really is made at home, not scaled up somewhere else and trucked in. After years of showing up nearly every Saturday, she's stepping away.
If you've been meaning to stock up, the math is simple. Today is September 7, which leaves three more Saturdays in the month, September 12, 19, and 26, before her table is gone from the lineup. That's not a season-ending closure like the concerts. It's a full stop.
Who Fills a Vacant Table
The market's produce backbone doesn't move much. Underwood Family Farms and McGrath Family Farm show up nearly every week, and they're the reason longtime shoppers know exactly which stall has the best stone fruit in July or the first winter squash in October. That consistency is part of why the market works.
The specialty tables are a different story. They turn over constantly, and the last few months have brought a real changing of the guard:
- Bonito Coffee Roasters, a small-batch, single-origin roaster based in Ojai and founded by Carlos Ramirez, who grew up in Nicaragua, brings a farm-to-cup lineup and mobile espresso catering back to the market on a rotating basis.
- Swedish Saturdays Candy Company joined the lineup on August 8, the same day the concert series wrapped, selling Swedish-style candy sourced without red dye 40, high fructose corn syrup, or trans fat, a nod to the Swedish tradition of saving sweets for one day a week.
- Buckaroo Bagels sells small-batch sourdough bagels that reliably sell out early, so this is a table worth hitting first, not last.
- Cup My Cakez covers the gluten-free and vegan pastry case, which is its own small signal of how much the vendor mix has diversified in recent seasons.
- RC Makes, a student vendor group tied to the entrepreneurship program at Rancho Campana High School, sells handmade goods and takes special orders, which is as good a reason as any to stop and support the next generation of small business owners in town.
None of these vendors were fixtures five years ago. Most of them weren't fixtures a year ago. That's the actual character of this market: a stable produce core surrounded by a specialty rotation that never really stops changing.
What a September Saturday Actually Looks Like Now
With the concert series behind it, Constitution Park goes back to being a park most Saturday mornings, not an event venue. Parking is easier. The lawn that was packed with folding chairs on August 8 is open grass again, good for a stroll through the Rose Garden or a stop at the Veterans Memorial before you cross over to the market tables. The park's 8.2 acres, tucked next to the Camarillo Public Library on Carmen Drive, go back to their quieter daily rhythm once the summer programming clears out.
That quieter rhythm is exactly when the market itself becomes the neighborhood's real weekly gathering point, not a warm-up act for something louder later. If you live in this part of Camarillo and you've fallen into the habit of treating the farmers market as background noise, September is a good month to actually pay attention to it. One familiar face is leaving. A handful of new ones have already taken up space at the tables. The produce anchors are still exactly where you left them.
That's the thing about a corner like this one. It feels permanent because the park and the market have both been there for decades. But permanence and stillness aren't the same thing. The lawn goes quiet in August. The vendor list keeps turning over every single month. If you want to catch Carol Takakura's seasonings one more time before her stall is gone, you have three Saturdays left to do it.
If you're weighing what a home in this part of Central Camarillo is actually worth in today's market, that kind of neighborhood detail, the small, constant churn that never shows up in a listing description, is exactly what Puckett Real Estate Team tracks alongside the comps. Reach out for a free home valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening on the ground here, not just what the numbers say.
