Ask most people who split their week between El Camino Real and the 5 freeway when Old Town goes quiet, and they will tell you sometime in October, once the string lights come down from Sunset Market and everyone retreats indoors for the year. That is not what actually happens. The math says otherwise, and it is worth doing the math, because the gap between one event ending and the next one starting is smaller than almost anyone driving through Old Town in September would guess.
The Tustin Sunset Market wraps its 2026 season on Thursday, September 17, running the usual 5:00 to 8:30 p.m. window at El Camino Real and Third Street. That is confirmed as one of the final two dates on the city’s own event page, the other being August 20. Five months of third-Thursday evenings, done for the year. But Tustin Tiller Days, the city’s long-running fall festival, opens at Columbus Tustin Park on October 2, with the parade running straight through Old Town on October 3. Count the days between the last Sunset Market and the first day of Tiller Days: fifteen. Not a season. Not even a month. Two weeks.
What Actually Wraps Up on September 17
The Sunset Market has run every third Thursday from May through September this year, and the closing night keeps the same format that has carried the whole run: a farmer’s market component, local vendors through the Dreamers Markets pop-up program, live music, a beer and wine garden, and food trucks lining El Camino Real. The Tustin Community Foundation has been running a monthly featured cocktail at its booth all season, and September’s pour is a Citrus Honey Whiskey Fizz, following June’s Sunset Sipper, July’s Stars & Sips Spritz, and August’s Tropical Breeze Sangria. That kind of month-to-month rotation is easy to miss unless you have actually been going, which is the point. This is not a festival built for out-of-towners. It is a neighborhood habit that happens to be open to the public.
If you have never made it out, September 17 is the one to catch, since the next Sunset Market Thursday will not come around again until next May.
The Market That Never Took a Season Off
Here is the part that gets lost when people talk about Old Town’s calendar going dark after summer. The Sunset Market is seasonal by design, but Old Town’s other market never was. The certified Farmers Market runs weekly, every Saturday, 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at the Prescott lot on El Camino Real and Second Street, and it does not pause for October, or for the holidays, or for anything short of extraordinary circumstances. It was never designed to close for the year, so there was never a “final Farmers Market” announcement to make. That is the actual contrast worth noticing. One event ends because it was always meant to be a five-month run. The other keeps going because it was never structured around a season in the first place.
That distinction matters if you are the kind of resident who plans a Saturday morning around produce and coffee. Nothing about your routine changes on September 18. The evening event goes away. The morning one does not.
Fifteen Days, Not a Dead Zone
| Tustin Sunset Market (final 2026 date) | Tustin Tiller Days 2026 | |
|---|---|---|
| Dates | Thursday, September 17 | October 2 through 4 |
| Hours | 5:00 to 8:30 p.m. | Friday 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Saturday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Sunday noon to 8 p.m. |
| Location | El Camino Real and Third Street | Columbus Tustin Park, with the parade running through Old Town on October 3 |
| What it is | Evening market: vendors, farmers market, food trucks, live music | Three-day fall festival: carnival, parade, multiple stages, beer and wine garden |
Laid out side by side, the fifteen-day window between them stops looking like a gap and starts looking like a handoff. One street event closes on a Thursday night in mid-September. Another, bigger one opens two and a half weeks later, at a different location with a different footprint, but still anchored to the same few blocks of Old Town, since the Tiller Days parade route runs directly through the historic core on Saturday, October 3, starting at 10 a.m.
If you assumed Old Town’s public calendar goes dormant once the Sunset Market lights come down, this is the detail that corrects it. The city’s own confirmed schedule shows there is no real lull, just a change in what kind of event is running.
What Tiller Days Actually Is
Tiller Days has been a fixture in Tustin since 1957, built around the city’s agricultural roots, and it has grown into the kind of event that pulls people in from outside Tustin entirely, not just from Old Town. The 2026 run spans three days at Columbus Tustin Park: a carnival with rides and midway games, multiple stages of live entertainment, food and craft vendors, a beer and wine garden, and a Backyard Brewfest on the closing Sunday. The parade is the piece that actually touches Old Town directly, weaving from Main and Pacific through the historic district on Saturday morning before wrapping near the festival grounds. Street closures for the parade route typically run from early morning through early afternoon that Saturday, so if you are trying to get somewhere on El Camino Real that morning, plan around it rather than through it.
Where Sunset Market is a low-key Thursday evening built around a few blocks and a rotating drink of the month, Tiller Days is the opposite scale: a weekend-long, park-anchored festival with decades of history behind it. They are not competing events. They are two different registers of the same civic instinct, that Old Town is a place where people gather in the street on purpose, whether that means a folding table of local vendors or a full carnival midway.
Where to Eat Once the Market Stalls Fold Up
Once the Sunset Market tables come down for the year, Old Town’s actual restaurant row does not skip a beat, and it is worth knowing what is there on a random Wednesday when there is no festival at all:
- Rutabegorz, serving health-conscious cuisine in Tustin since 1970, long before either the market or the festival existed in their current forms
- Storico Spaghetteria, an Italian spot that has become a regular stop for the sidewalk-strolling crowd
- Chaak Kitchen, tucked into the same walkable stretch
- Belly of the Beast, hidden inside the Stowaway Tiki Bar, the kind of find that only makes sense once you have actually walked the block
- Morning Lavender Cafe, the coffee stop that shows up on nearly every local list of Old Town regulars
None of these depend on an event calendar to be worth a visit. They are simply what is already there, on any given night, which is the larger point about Old Town’s rhythm. The public events come and go on a schedule. The neighborhood underneath them does not.
The Actual Takeaway
The version of this story that gets repeated every fall is that Old Town Tustin winds down once summer ends. What the calendar actually shows is a fifteen-day handoff from one kind of gathering to another, backed by a Saturday Farmers Market that was never on a seasonal clock to begin with. If you live here, that is useful to know before you assume there is nothing to do between mid-September and Halloween. If you do not live here yet, it says something about the kind of neighborhood this is, one where the public calendar barely has a gap in it.
Clara Blunk works this stretch of Orange County because details like these are the ones that actually shape what it feels like to live somewhere, long before any conversation about buying or selling comes up. If Old Town Tustin is on your radar for any reason, that is a good conversation to start whenever you are ready for it.
