We're excited to present a guest from APS Melbourne who will be running a mushroom cultivation workshop: Caine Barlow!

Growing mushrooms may seem daunting but they can be relatively easy to grow - they require a little care and patience. This event will cover details about how to cultivate a few well known edible mushrooms (oysters, shiitake, Ink cap) and a couple of medicinal non-psychoactive mushrooms (Ganoderma, Turkey tail). From cardboard tek and spiderman tek, thought to agar and grain spawn. The workshop will finish with time for discussion at the end.

Caine Barlow is a fungi educator who has been cultivating and studying fungi for 15 years. In 2019 he completed a Master's degree where his research project was to predict a preliminary conservation status for many Australian fungi.

As a fungi educator, he is passionate about encouraging people to see fungi in a new light by demonstrating how easy they are to grow in kitchen and garden environments. He likes to inspire a sense of creativity in the cloning and propagation of mycelium, experimentation with different substrates, and how to hack together equipment.

When not growing fungi, Caine volunteers his time with Entheogenesis Australis and MYCOmmunity applied mycology. He writes for Doubleblind and is a teacher in their 102 HTGM course. He is also a regular contributor, “trusted identifier” and administrator on a variety of fungi oriented website forums and facebook groups.

Caine has an Instagram account "Guerrilla Mycology” where he blogs about his cultivation techniques and the ethnomycology of fungi he finds in the field.