The tunnel house at the Christian Love Community Center held it’s groundbreaking ceremony on Friday, March 6. Members from the community attended in celebration of the facility.

“I was shocked about how excited the kids were about growing vegetables,” said Angeline Green, director of the Christian Love Community Center.

The tunnel house allows the children to be able to plant vegetables and fruits all year long.

Typically in Alabama, fruits and vegetables can only be grown in an outside garden for five months of the year. With the tunnel house, the time of year is not a constraint.

“With all the technology that we have, we could construct something to give our farms some means that is economical,” said Victor Khan, plant breeder and plasticulturist at Wiregrass RC&D. The houses are constructed with wooden frames.

“It’s going to be the new concept to growing things,” said James Currington, the executive director of Wiregrass RC&D Council. Currington hopes to see the trend of gardening in tunnel houses spread across the state and into the rest of the country.

“Everyone in the United States should have one,” he said. Wiregress RC&D is looking to begin constructing tunnel houses on asphalt and concrete, bringing in top soil, so that growth can happen anywhere.

Kahn said that the design of the tunnel houses came from the need of them.

“[The purpose is] to provide growers means of producing vegetables during the seven months of the year when it is cold or cool,” he said.

The tunnel house at the Christian Love Community Center is the first tunnel house to be put in place in Pike County.

However, they have built tunnel houses at five schools in the Wiregrass area.

Kahn described a time at Abbeville High School when the students grew collards, and gave them to the women in the cafeteria to cook.

When the students ate the collards, the cafeteria was silent. Kahn asked why it was so quiet, and one of the teachers told him, “They are eating.”

“That was the best testimony that we could have ever had,” Kahn said.

With the new tunnel house open, another one under construction and the new on site food pantry, the Christian Love Community Center has big plans for the community.