 So, hello everybody. As Soren said, Matalando from Amas. Trash or treasure. This is a topic that we talk about often at the restaurant. And I have to say I was a little bit guilty when I started or felt a very, actually not a little bit, very guilty when I looked back on in the context in which our garden was created. We have about 500 square meters in front of the restaurant that we create or create, we grow herbs and different vegetables. And it was created in the context, it was very materialistic context that it was created to create a better environment for our guests to grow vegetables for us to use. And it wasn't until about six months after we opened that we took a step back and said to ourselves, okay, we have this amazing space that most people would kill for. And we realized that with this space comes a certain bit of responsibility. And this responsibility is we need to work in the most sustainable way we possibly can. And we are given this opportunity with the space in front of us. And when we started thinking like this, it changed everything for us. And I can go, I could talk for hours about what we do and what we're proud of, but I'm not. Because I only have 15 minutes. I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about earthworms, which is one obsession we've developed, and coffee grinds, earthworms. These little guys were officially hired in January of 2014, six months after we opened. And before I continue, I'm just going to get super nerdy right now. And I promise it might only happen once more during the presentation. I want to talk about how earthworms are important to us and the three major roles they play with us at Amas. First and foremost, they are the engineers of the ecosystems. They're kind of the invisible unsung heroes. They create, they move through soil and create space that allows carbon, water, and oxygen to penetrate. Thus feeding bacteria in different fungi, which in turn break down worm castings, which I'll talk about later, and which are able to feed the plants. They're the composting middlemen. They break down organic matter. They turn it into something that bacteria and fungi can eat, thus turning it into something that plants can absorb. And they are super flowers. They distribute nutrients and soils evenly in growing environments. It's through all these different processes that we are able at Amas to supply nutrients for our compost tea. We're able to, the worms, we have two keyhole gardens, and the worms actually kick-started these keyhole gardens. Without them, they wouldn't exist. And they create micro environments in our vertical gardens, which we have in our greenhouse. And last but not least, they are the managers of our entire garden when it's in bloom and when it's not in bloom. This is where they were conceived. And I tell you, the first version of this was far less glamorous than this. It was created in a very weird back room at the restaurant with no windows caged in that housed our plumbing and our electricity. But they've moved up in life. And now they live in the greenhouse. It was a nightmare in the beginning. And we had numerous worm fatalities trying to figure out how to raise these worms in the type of environment that they flourish in. So the structure of the worm hotel, it's broken down here. We start the very first layer in the dark room in the back of the kitchen, looked like this. This is shredded cardboard, raw kitchen waste. It warms on the bottom. They eat their way up looking for fresh food. We have a container on top of this, which has more kitchen waste, shredded cardboard. After they leave the first container, they leave behind worm castings. And I'll talk about that later because that's another obsession of mine, worm poop. So after they leave the worm castings behind, and they've moved on, and they're about to move into the second box, and they move through these boxes via holes that are drilled on the bottom because they're constantly looking for the next food supply. Move up to the next box. And then what we do, we take the worm castings out, store it, put a new box on top, and start with fresh kitchen waste and cardboard. And this is the completed worm hotel, luxurious. Now, when you take on the process of raising worms, you take on the process of cooking for worms. And those of you who have restaurants or work in restaurants, if you think your guests are temperamental and moody, these little guys right here, they, a whole new definition. Because in order to feed the worms, you have to have a proper balance of nitrogen, which is organic kitchen waste, and carbon, which is shredded cardboard. You get those balances off. You're most definitely getting an email, a complaint email the next day. Worms and compost. I mean, this is a no brainer. This is what worms live for. The success we've had with our one worm tower, our one worm hotel, we decided actually to take it to the next level. We're turning our whole composting system, which is an eight compartment composting system, into essentially the equivalent of a worm city. We are a full worm production of eight compartments, not just one. And we're moving our compost around the other side of the greenhouse. Now I mentioned worm castings earlier, and this is literally the holy grail to a gardener. It is the richest natural fertilizer known to man. I mean, just a little example is 10 grams of worm castings can supply the nutrients to a 15 centimeter potted plant for two months. So to have this at your disposal when having a garden or a greenhouse is invaluable. At this state of the worm process, this is the state in which, like I mentioned before, bacteria and fungi can absorb it. So in this case, this is what worms have taken trash and turned into treasure. Compost tea. It's something that when we talked about growing in a greenhouse, I myself was probably the biggest skeptic. I said, you know what? I've never had things from a greenhouse that tasted good. But instead, and that I was very against the whole process. Again, I was able to take a step back and said, all right, screw that. Anyone can give up. Anyone can say something is impossible. Instead, we embraced the challenge and we looked at the most important factor of growing vegetables and that is what the plant eats. We didn't create this process. This is a process that is widely used. But in our sense, this compost tea is the water of life for our garden, for our greenhouse. You actually can drink it yourself. It smells like matcha tea. I wouldn't suggest it though. So this compost tea can consist primarily of worm castings, compost, and water that we have collected. We put it in this container. The mixture goes here and we aerate it with a fish pump for 24 hours, bringing all the bacteria back to life. We then do something which is called foliage feeding. And this is where you spray it directly on the leaves of the plant, literally the equivalent of us taking a shot of heroin and drifting off into Nonna land. So I believe, as we're talking, does anybody have cabbage leaves in their hands yet? Behind schedule, Jackie, come on. So being passed to the audience right now, Jackie, who is our gardener, and I'm not in any way going to take credit for these cabbage leaves because these are the labor of her love. Like I said, I was very skeptical of the process of growing in a greenhouse and through testing different recipes for compost tea. We actually achieve something that I'm quite happy with, but I really want you guys to taste as well because I can stand up here and talk about it all day long and brag about it, but it's the truth is in the mouthful. Helping the plants grow. Back to earthworms. I got off on compost tea. I mentioned before that we have vertical gardens and these are something that I also was skeptical of. And we looked at how do we create an ecosystem that is similar to what exists outside. So I'm just going to explain what a zip grow or a vertical garden is. It's about this tall. It's about this big around. And it has a mesh center with a slit down the side. The mesh pulls out. You put down your young sprouts that you sprouted in soil and you lay them through the middle of the mesh, fold it over. Before we fold it over, we add earthworms to it to make sure it's not a sterile dead environment that the plants are growing in. There's living things moving around there. The earthworms process the solids that flow through from the water that get washed down from the water. And this is what a zip go looks like closed up and fully functional. The greenhouse. This picture to me is very special because it really what I everything I just talked about. It really kind of encompasses everything. We really wanted to create as tight of a closed circle between the restaurant and the garden and the greenhouse as we could. So everything I just talked about more or less exists here. The worms, the compost tea, and the zip grows. And they're not here tonight. They couldn't be here tonight. But I just wanted to, hopefully they'll see this on a live stream later on. But I wanted to thank Mikal and Lassa from Biowark. These two guys, they just started their company a year ago. They had no idea what they were doing and they more or less used our garden as an experimental place, if you will. They knew how to grow plants but they didn't know how to grow plants that tasted delicious. So we worked really hard with them to come up with recipes for the compost tea and not growing too much at a time and not just monocrops, growing a lot of different things. But they really pushed us in the right direction. And they actually really taught us how important earthworms were and made us obsessed at the same time. So just a little, I know I've talked about all these things and turning trash into treasure. And I'm just going to give you a couple numbers that before I go on to the next obsession that we've been able to accomplish over the last year with Mikal and Lassa. And through these practices, we've reduced the blue trash bins that everyone has outside there that we use. We started out when we opened with five of those. We had five of those emptied three times a week. Now we have six of those emptied once a week. We used to empty three bins of cardboard a week. And now we're down to one bin of cardboard a week. And so what they've done with us has, I mean, the numbers say it all right here. So I'm very thankful to have had this relationship with them. And we continue to work on new things, new ways to process compost. So it goes faster. So if you're ever at the restaurant, please do not hesitate to ask for a tour of the greenhouse, a tour of the compost. That's my personal favorite tour. And it's funny, when I worked at Noma, kitchen tours and showing, because you're so proud of what you do. And you want to show people what you do. So we gave kitchen tours to everyone. And I said to myself, oh, no more kitchen tours. We have an open kitchen. We're not going to have to do it. It's going to be great incomes greenhouse tours. So all right, I want to talk about our nested obsession now. Coffee beans. Last time I'm going to get nerdy. So nutrients and coffee grinds, potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen, potassium is key to helping plants distribute water, nutrients and energy. Phosphorus, key to photosynthesis, photosynthesis, vascular structure, i.e. root and stock growth and nitrogen, key element to chlorophyll. What makes plants green? That's a key component to photosynthesis. Now, from beginning to end the life cycle of a coffee bean, Adam asks the obvious coffee for guests. So as Renee mentioned earlier, coffee grinds, we produce five liters of coffee grinds per service. And you can't help but in our coffee section is actually right in the middle of the kitchen for two reasons. The chef's need coffee is right there. And the other reason is was originally for the chefs to be able to help with the coffee service. And to actually see it right in front of your face every day, five liters of coffee grinds every time you walk to the distation is like, you can't help but thinking of this ingredient in your face every day. Okay, there has to be a way we can use this. The obvious one is we use it in our compost because it has all these nutrients and stuff. But then we started thinking, okay, if you open the lid of a five liter of wet coffee grinds, you can't help but smelling coffee. And that smell is flavor. So as a chef, you're obviously constantly in the search of flavor, the next flavor, a flavor you've had before and you want to turn into another flavor. So you start thinking, what can we do with these grinds? If you think about a grind, of course, in the brewing process, all the top notes are taken out, the acidity, maybe the these chocolate deep aromas, but there's still something left in there. If you can smell it, there's something there. So we worked on harnessing what was left behind. The first one we came up with, roasting beet roots with cross coffee grinds, roasting them in aluminum foil, a little bit of water added to it, very hot for a long time. And I tell you, the coffee really starts to penetrate the beet root. Are you in chips yet? Thank you. Next one, the chip in which you're eating. This is a mixture of a puree of or I should say oats ground in the blender with used coffee grinds, water, a little bit of butter and sugar. This pretty much changes everything and opens so many doors to what you can do with these coffee grinds. The ones you had it, I cracked a little black pepper. It was kind of fun. I was making them this morning and kind of, let's make them a little more exciting. So this really changed everything for us. It really kind of, for me anyway, really opened up my mind. Okay, if we can make a chip with these that taste decent, then we can do other things with this. So now everyone's head is kind of headed in this direction. What can we do with the coffee grinds? But of course, we don't use them all because they're quite important to the worms. All right, back on to the life cycle of the coffee bean. So at this point, it's been used for compost. It's been used for cooking. So in the use of compost and going back into the garden, it finds itself reincarnated. Starts out as a plant, ends as a plant, but the journey is not over. So last, I think it was Thursday, I went out with Jackie. We picked some plants, what was growing in the garden, some in the greenhouse, and this is kind of our, this time of year, all just know is the shittiest time to cook. You don't have very many things from spring, everything from winter is running out. We were able to pick this little selection on Thursday from the garden, thanks to coffee grinds. That's not the last obsession, but that's the only one I'm going to talk about today. So just to kind of sum it all up and kind of what I've learned through this experience and being, having a restaurant over the last two years, and you learn so many life lessons and you learn so many things about yourself. But I think the biggest life lessons that I've learned is that we all have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to not only work in a sustainable way, but we have a responsibility to each other. We have responsibility to share information and to send an example. And just, I mean, nothing what I've talked about over the last 15 minutes, I think it's 15 minutes, really could not have been possible with so many people, not only in this audience, but so many people that we work with. And it's possible because people are willing to share information with us. And that is, it's so important. And I think Christian mentioned that earlier when he was talking, this exchange of information and knowledge. Because without each other, none of this would happen and our industry would really, really not move forward. At that, on that note, I just want to thank everyone very much for letting me be here. It's not often that I get to talk about this stuff, which is usually more materialistic shit. But I'm always down to talk a little trash. Thank you guys.