TURNER – It’s not every day you see a person scoop soil out of a plant pot and spoon it into their mouth, but it happened.

Rare also is the sight of men and women making sounds of satisfaction after eating whoopie pies filled with worms, but that happened, too.

It happened Friday night at the annual Mud Supper at the G.A.R. in North Turner, where tables were heaped high with a variety of food prepared to resemble earth, dirt and rocks.

The mission: to celebrate good food and neighbors while also paying homage to the arrival of mud season after a long and arduous winter.

“It’s nice that there’s mud, isn’t it?” Pastor Ann Marie Simone said. “Mud is the harbinger of spring.”

Each dining table was adorned with winter boots serving as vases. Other tables were crowded with both desserts and entries. Mud was the star of the show and the 50 or so people who arrived by 5 p.m. happily spooned brown concoctions onto their plates.

A man paused before the plant pot and examined the dense brown substance in which plastic flowers were rooted. It looked a lot like soil and yet people were eagerly digging in.

“Oklahoma dirt cake,” Simone explained. The ingredients: crushed Oreo cookies and Cool-Whip. Fine and soft like planting soil but quite delicious.

In a back room, not yet unveiled, was a cake covered with gritty toppings. At a glance, it looked like someone had gathered pebbles and sand from the road out front and sprinkled a bucket of it onto the icing.

“These are chocolate rocks,” said Elaine Parlin, creator of the Rock Cake.

The whoopie pie worms were actually gummy candy. The dessert looked like horror movie props, but the diners reported the pies were delicious.

For three years, members of the North Turner Union Presbyterian Church have been gathering for mud suppers. Typically, it happens in late March. This year, when the date of the supper came around, it was clear they couldn’t go on.

“On March 26, there was no mud to be found,” said Jody Goodwin. “We had to postpone it.”

On Friday night, snow was still the dominant presence in the outside world. But appropriately, the path leading to the door of the G.A.R. was slick with wet mud. Those who stepped inside had to wipe their feet and kick it off their boots.

“As long as it isn’t snow,” Simone said.

And then after scraping off the mud, folks started digging into dishes of food that tried hard to resemble the squishy stuff from the parking lot.

Pots of baked beans and chili looked vaguely muddish. The lasagna had the look if you moved the pasta around. Chocolate cake, chocolate milk and brownies were all perfectly good mud impersonators.

The dinner continued until 7 o’clock. As soon as a chair was vacated, it was filled again by a new arrival. And there was good news. By the end of the gathering, the sky had clouded and rain began to fall. It was expected to continue through the weekend. That’s bad news if you just waxed your floor. Good news if you happen to be in a mind to celebrate mud.