It's not often that you hear about people gathering to celebrate the virtues of mustard, basil, and broccoli, but they're just three of the many California foods that have their own festivals. Some food festivals are really offbeat. In the delta town of Isleton, the Crawdad Festival heats up in June. In August, tributes to rice, beans, and the fixings that go with them, such as tomatoes and chilis, bring out the crowds. But the strangest event of all is the Fourth of July Worm Races in the Northern California town of Clearlake. Bring your own racing earthworm or rent one. Don't like worms? How about eggplant? According to fair organizers, all the "popular" vegetables were taken, so the little town of Loomis near Sacramento chose to celebrate the vegetable nobody wanted: eggplant. Eggplant is named for its often egg-like shape. It comes in a variety of colors and sizes. One of the most unusual is the Louisiana long green, considered the best culinary eggplant grown in the area. The Loomis Eggplant Festival is a once-a-year opportunity to sink your teeth into eggplant ravioli, eggplant-on-a-stick, eggplant cookies, and eggplant pie, all of which can be served on eggplant-shaped pottery. This year, the food, fun, and festivities take place on September 19. For an event that's truly earthy, kick up your heels at the Hoes Down Festival, as in "the harvest is done, time to put your hoes down." For anyone who came of age in the 1960s, the decade of love beads and flower children, Hoes Down is like coming home. Much of the clothing is tie-dyed, and activities range from making hat bands out of corn and flowers, to "free-form" dancing, and rides on an old hay wagon. This two-day festival turns the farm into a big playground for children. They're so engaged in farm-related fun they don't realize how much they're learning, but their parents do. According to Janet Delaney, who brought her family here from Berkeley, "It's very important for my citified children to have some sense of the country. They play on the equipment. They run through the fields, and they get a sense of scale and connectedness to farm life and food." The Hoes Down Festival has become so popular that it has even been featured in the pages of "National Geographic Magazine." This year, it springs to life on October 3 and 4 at Full Belly Farm in the farming town of Guinda in the Capay Valley northeast of the San Francisco Bay Area. If you have questions or comments about this story, please E-mail Senior Producer Corita Gravitt at corita.gravitt@mailexcite.com.