Gardening luminary: Jim Hole

Name and garden job.

Jim Hole, previous partner in Hole’s Greenhouse, now Vice President, Cultivation at Atlas Biotechnologies.

How did you get this job?

Jim was born into it! His parents, Lois and Ted Hole, owned and operated Hole’s Greenhouse, which they started as a market garden operation on their farm in St. Albert, Alberta. They built the business from a roadside stand in the 1950s into a huge retail establishment, with Jim and his brother Bill joining officially in 1978.

What would you do if you didn’t have this job?

“I’d be a football player,” says Jim, who had tentatively signed with the Edmonton Eskimos before deciding to enter the family business.

How did you learn to garden?

Asking guys like Jim how they learned to garden is a little like asking anyone else how they learned to breathe. His lifetime of knowledge does include a degree in Agriculture from the University of Alberta, and he is a Certified Professional Horticulturist with the American Society for Horticultural Science and a Certified Arborist with the International Society of Arboriculture.

Earliest gardening memory.

“There’s a picture of me on my mom’s back while she was weeding,” he says. The garden had to be weeded, the kids had to be taken care of, so Lois just strapped the younger one to her back papoose-style.

Biggest ever gardening mistake.

Jim laughs a little. “When trees are grown in a pot the roots tend to wrap around inside,” he relates. He’s always told folks they need to unwind the roots when they set the trees in the ground. One time, though, Jim didn’t follow his own advice and planted a row of cedars without loosening the root balls. They did not survive. Some died and other blew over in a strong wind.

What would you love

s upplied photo. to do that you’ve never been able to in the garden? “Fruit trees.” Jim has a big enough yard to have a vegetable garden, but not so big as to be able to keep the fruit trees he would love to have. “There’s something magic about grafting onto an apple,” he says, wistfully.

Question you’re tired of hearing.

He hates having someone come to him with a two-dollar packet of seeds and saying, if I plant this now will it survive? The answer is maybe, but why not give it a try? “People will spend four dollars on a coffee, but they won’t risk two dollars on a packet of seeds?” he says.

All time favourite gardening tool.

Nothing takes the place of a stirrup hoe, according to Jim. Shaped like a stirrup, with a thin metal kind of loop of a blade, flat on the bottom, he wouldn’t be without one. d

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