Yankee Goes Gruntin' For Worms

You have not lived until you have experienced the worm gruntin' festival held annually in Sopchoppy Florida (I love to say Sopchoppy to my Northern family and friends) . 

S O P C H O P P Y

Worm fans

It's a worm folks!

When I first heard about this festival I had mental images of locals on stage with a microphone grunting like a worm, (does a worm grunt?) not unlike the pig calling contests I have seen on the news. Far from it! First off, My wife had to tell me it's worm gruntin' honey, NOT worm grunting! Worm gruntin' is the art of earth worming - using tools with names such as ropping iron, wooden stob, gallon can and croaker sack.....

.... you use these tools to create a vibration by moving back and forth the rooping iron across the wooden stob - the vibration moves the little fellas from under the soil to topside for easy pickings to be used for bait.

At the festival, I found the worm gruntin' master-Gary Revell. His family has been doing this for many, many years. Gary owns a bait shop in Sopchoppy and was very excited to show me his "catch" from his recent gruntin' activities.



Gary is a very happy man and loves what he does with a passion: 



I appreciated that more than anything else at the festival, how passionate Gary was to his trade and how he enjoyed telling us what he does and how he enjoys doing it. It's a family tradition. The closest thing I ever came to doing something like this up east was to dig for hours in my backyard when I was a kid and could only find those darn......

 ......Rolly Polly bugs that curled up into a ball when you touched them. 


Or how about the time I told little Graham and Nathan that we were going in the backyard and dig to china....They were all in at the time. We never made it to China. 


The bottom line of the festival was just as much about the people than the worms,good people celebrating an old tradition....

The festival is not without royalty, each year a king and queen of the festival are chosen...errr coronated.

And of course there is always festival food..

This is big in the land of FSU

Everybody is getting into the hot sauce biz

Who said the South likes fried food?

Did you know this about worms?

• An earthworm can grow only so long. A well-fed adult will depend on what kind of worm it is, how many segments it has, how old it is and how well fed it is. An Lumbricus terrestris will be from 90-300 millimeters long.
• A worm has no arms, legs or eyes.
• There are approximately 2,700 different kinds of earthworms.
• Worms live where there is food, moisture, oxygen and a favorable temperature. If they don’t have these things, they go somewhere else.
• In one acre of land, there can be more than a million earthworms.
• The largest earthworm ever found was in South Africa and measured 22 feet from its nose to the tip of its tail.
• Worms tunnel deeply in the soil and bring subsoil closer to the surface mixing it with the topsoil. Slime, a secretion of earthworms, contains nitrogen. Nitrogen is an important nutrient for plants. The sticky slime helps to hold clusters of soil particles together in formations called aggregates.
• Charles Darwin spent 39 years studying earthworms more than 100 years ago.
• Worms are cold-blooded animals.
• Earthworms have the ability to replace or replicate lost segments. This ability varies greatly depending on the species of worm you have, the amount of damage to the worm and where it is cut. It may be easy for a worm to replace a lost tail, but may be very difficult or impossible to replace a lost head if things are not just right.
• Baby worms are not born. They hatch from cocoons smaller than a grain of rice.
• The Australian Gippsland Earthworm grows to 12 feet long and can weigh 1-1/2 pounds.
• Even though worms don’t have eyes, they can sense light, especially at their anterior (front end). They move away from light and will become paralyzed if exposed to light for too long (approximately one hour).
• If a worm’s skin dries out, it will die.
• Worms are hermaphrodites. Each worm has both male and female organs. Worms mate by joining their clitella (swollen area near the head of a mature worm) and exchanging sperm. Then each worm forms an egg capsule in its clitellum.

• Worms can eat their weight each day.

These type of events are awesome to people watch..It's a chance for folks of all walks of life to make a statement!

Multiple choice?

You talk'in to me?

Double Ristretto Venti Half-Soy Nonfat Decaf Organic Chocolate Brownie Iced Vanilla Double-Shot Gingerbread Frappuccino Extra Hot With Foam Whipped Cream Upside Down Double Blended, One Sweet'N Low and One Nutrasweet, and Ice

Don't you want to go?

Did not see these much up east

Add caption here

All in all is was a good day out of the house and away from such things as the computer. Boo-Boo had a great time too, he was all about doing it all by himself today....