The Last Good Weeks: A Book of the Harvest

By the time you read this, the first hard frost is on its way and the province's fields are about to start sleeping on us, but that doesn't mean the season is over. The work simply changes shape, as what was growing gets stored, pickled, fermented, or moved under greenhouses’ panes of glass. From here, our winter tablescapes have been decided; the hardest stretch of the year is the one right after the harvest, when everything arrives at once and the clock is running.

It is this stretch of time that gives The Main’s special edition magazine its name. The Last Good Weeks is a book of the harvest: Through interviews and photography, it documents the people who feed Montreal through slices of their lives: the island's own agricultural history and the fruit it forgot; farmers planting in and picking from fields in the Townships and city alleyways and backyards; a chef whose menus pivot at a moment's notice; cider and winemakers bottling Quebec's cold-climate terroir; and an Italian family that's spent fifty years teaching Montrealers how to can tomatoes.

Inside, readers can find three centuries of history next to experiments that won't pay off for a decade. A melon the Jesuits brought over in the 1600s, lost for half a century and revived from an Iowa seed bank, shares space with fig trees in Austin that die to the root every winter and come back stronger than ever. A retired farmer from Guangdong tends water spinach beside a Chinatown parking lot, and a cidery trades an industrial park for a 200-year-old barn outside Quebec City. And what does a Joe Beef co-founder cook for the volunteers stomping his grapes?

It is also a guide, giving good reason to keep a copy in the kitchen: a month-by-month manual to eating seasonally in Quebec, from the first asparagus to the last cranberries.

The stories in The Last Good Weeks live in print only, so if you want to read them, you'll need a copy. Here's a preview what's inside.

Table of Contents

The Cultivated City

When Jacques Cartier reached Hochelaga in 1535, he found cornfields below the mountain. Flash forward to 1938, and roughly a third of the produce at the city's public markets was still grown on the island.

From Sulpician gardens and wartime plots to a firefighters' strike that gave birth to the community garden program, this history lesson dives into how Montreal became a world capital of urban agriculture over centuries of planting whatever ground was going spare.

The Shape of Flavour

If you eat out in Montreal, chances are you've eaten something from Dominic Labelle's plots. The farmer-chef behind Parcelles in Austin supplies kitchens across the city like Limbo, Gia, and Nora Gray while serving whatever he can out of his own dining room on the farm. The size and scope of his agricultural project has grown in the years since it first started, and we wanted to learn what he’s taken away from the experience. "Uniformity is our enemy in food," he told us. This is where you find out why that is.