Alumnus Jim Hole’s family gardening legacy expands into an eco-friendly future and beyond.
The Hole family’s legacy started simply enough. In 1952, Ted, ’52 BSc (Ag), and Lois Hole, ’00 LLD (Hon), established their family farm on the banks of the Sturgeon River where they began selling vegetables from their garden patch to roadside passersby. Fast-forward nearly 60 years later and the accidental market garden is a thriving garden centre and greenhouse business with successful forays into floral design, e-commerce, publishing and media.
“Status quo is not really an option for us. Our family is a little too restless that way,” says Ted and Lois’s youngest son Jim Hole, ’79 BSc (Ag), co-owner and -founder of Hole’s Greenhouse & Garden Centre in St. Albert.
Today, the Holes – including Jim’s older brother Bill, ’78 BSc (Ag), and sister-in-law Valerie Hole, ’82 BSc (Ag) – have expanded the empire again in an effort to develop the concept of gardening to reflect a broader, more modern view of living. Reimagining their already wildly successful enterprise, the siblings opened the doors to their new, state-of-the-art, $30 million gardening mecca, The Enjoy Centre, on April 11.
Already bustling on a Saturday afternoon, customers browse Hole's Encore garden centre and stop at Prairie Bistro for lunch.
Set on 11 rolling acres overlooking Big Lake and nestled fittingly next to the Lois Hole Centennial Provincial Park, the Enjoy Centre is an enormous, steel and glass superstructure that dwarfs its modest predecessor.
“We’ve taken it to another level,” Jim says of the new incarnation of the family’s garden industry legacy. “It’s more than the garden centre now, more than just the plants. This is a lifestyle centre.”
Besides the family’s famous greenhouse and garden retail—now known as Hole’s Encore—the 20,000 square metre (215,000 square foot) behemoth includes a 600-seat event space, gift shops, spa and wellness centre, yoga studio, food market, farm fresh deli, bakery, fine wine store and a café-style/fine-casual dining bistro.
“We evaluated where we thought the world was going and how we could make a change – not just an incremental change in the way we do business, but a radical change. We’re trying to appeal to a younger demographic who is going to look at this as a place where they can come to eat, shop, check out the garden center and just spend the day here.”
Within the Enjoy Centre’s sunny interior, the Holes have built a tightly-knit community of local businesses who share the philosophy of ethical and responsible business for which the family is known. Each of the compatible businesses is locally-owned and/or supports local production. “In Europe you’ll see garden centres with a restaurant, but not this whole variety of different businesses that we think are complimentary to our vision. There’s nothing else like this in the world,” Jim explains.
Julianna Mimande, general manager of Prairie Bistro
Julianna Mimande, ’04 BA, general manager of the centre’s eatery, Prairie Bistro, is impressed with that vision. “[The Holes] are local people with local money supporting independence within a space that could have easily been occupied by a Starbucks or a Whole Foods, but they’ve chosen independence because they themselves value that,” she says.
A former owner of local-food restaurant, Bacon (now Culina Highlands), and co-author of the cookbook We Eat Together, poli-sci grad Mimande is excited her current culinary enterprise will reap unique benefits from its location in the Enjoy Centre. Locally-minded neighbours including Amaranth Whole Foods, Sandy View Farms Delicatessen, Prairie Bakery and Liquid Harvest Fine Wines will offer a bounty of foods and supplies. A green roof situated on the Enjoy Centre’s south side will produce tomatoes and salad greens for the Bistro – and one day, Julianna hopes, include an apiary for fresh honey. In addition, an aquaponics project, in which fish and plant species are raised in a closed symbiotic system, will keep the Bistro well stocked with rainbow trout and basil.
The Centre continues to dazzle with modernity – airport-style people movers carry shoppers and carts between levels and an ultra-mod décor reminiscent of The Jetsons graces the Prairie Bistro – but the innovations of the facility go well beyond aesthetics. The Enjoy Centre is also an icon of sustainable design.
“By stacking our facility’s elements on top of each other, we’ve reduced both our physical and carbon footprint,” Jim explains. Natural gas fuelled co-generation units in the basement warehouse produce electricity while using waste heat to warm the greenhouses above. The greenhouse roof itself is double-paned glass and features an automated shutter system that regulates the amount of light that shines in while also reducing heat loss. The facility’s rain-collection system – a series of hollow beams running from the roof outside to a collection tank in the basement warehouse – delivers water to the Holes’ crop of bedding plants via a flooding process wherein the floor of the greenhouse is flooded with water, the plants absorb the water they need, and the excess water drains back into the collection tank to be filtered and reused later. “We address between 80 to 90 percent of our water demand by using rainwater this way,” Jim says proudly.
A flood floor watering system in the Hole's greenhouse is both sustainable and reduces disease in the plant stock.
There’s a clear natural progression from the Holes’ beginnings, and underlying influence of Ted and Lois in what the siblings have accomplished today. “Dad was always a leader in looking to the future. Mom was always big on water conservation and reducing waste,” Jim recalls. “All those things are a smaller-scale version of this next big step we’ve taken.” Jim also credits his education at the U of A with instilling environmental values in him. “When I was going to university,
Fred Bentley [’39 BSc, ’42 MSc, ’90 LLD(Hon), and former dean of agriculture (1959-68)] was the iconic soil scientist who never stopped telling his class about the importance of conservation, and I heard that message loud and clear. You take those things with you — the things your parents tell you and what your university professors tell you — and you go forward.”
The Holes hope to share their inherited philosophies of sustainability, community-mindedness and conservation through a host of activities for adults and children including greenhouse and green roof tours, cooking courses and demonstrations in a lower level kitchen classroom and, of course, gardening classes and workshops.
“We’re really proud of what we’ve done, but at the same time, we by no means think we have everything down perfect. Customers will tell us what we’re doing right and wrong, and that will shape the way things go.” The scope of The Enjoy Centre is almost mind-bogglingly huge, and Jim admits it took a lot vision and guts to get this far, but as his mother Lois famously quipped, “If you take risks and have trust, you’ll almost always be rewarded with a beautiful harvest.”