Adaptonics
It all started with a compost heap...
Adaptonics was not created on the drawing board.
The story began in 2014 in Tenerife with the idea of a Healing Garden. I grew Artemisia annua, experimented with various medicinal plants, and explored adaptogens and a question that has stayed with me to this day:
What actually keeps us healthy?
This led to conversations, experiments, videos, and articles—and eventually to Adaptonics.
2014: From an Idea to a Company
With Artemisia annua, things really began to take off. In 2014, I presented the project at Prof. Günter Faltin’s GründerGarage and launched my first crowdfunding campaign.
There were appearances on German television, interviews, new plants, and new ideas. Not all of them were brilliant. Some were pretty crazy. And there are things I would do differently today.
But that is exactly how Adaptonics came into being...
Known from radio and television
In 2016, Kabel Eins followed the Healing Garden for its new documentary series about entrepreneurs “From Eccentric to Winner”. I took part in the very first pilot episode with my plants, my extracts, and some pretty crazy ideas from Tenerife.
To this day, the show is often confused with “The Lion’s Den.” In fact, it was not a pitch show: the camera crew accompanied me at work and told the story behind the Healing Garden.
After it aired, our shop was initially overwhelmed...
A look back: Artemisia annua in 2014
This video was made in 2014, right at the beginning of my story with Artemisia annua. In it, Dr. Fritz Helmut Hemmerich talks about herbal medicine, viruses, and nature’s adaptability—and about the possibility of a future pandemic. Six years later, this part of the conversation took on a relevance that probably no one had anticipated at the time.
Just one year after this video, Artemisia annua came into the global spotlight: in 2015, Chinese pharmacologist Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of artemisinin, an active compound from Artemisia annua that fundamentally changed the treatment of malaria.
2017: Adaptonics at dm
Three years after the first experiments in the Healing Garden, my products were added to the range at dm-drogerie markt in 2017.
An idea that had originally been conceived as a small tea stand for the organic farmers’ market had ultimately become something else entirely.
2020: The coronavirus madness...
When the pandemic hit, our cistus products sold out overnight—the entire annual supply. This experience gave rise to the idea for Imun Guard.
At the same time, I sat down during lockdown and wrote five essays on self-efficacy, antifragility, sense of coherence, optimism, and self-esteem—about what we can actually influence ourselves during a crisis.
What remains with us from that time is not nostalgia, but a conviction: After the pandemic comes the next pandemic. We need more serious research—and the willingness to become not merely resilient, but antifragile: systems that grow through challenges instead of merely surviving them.
More than 10,000 customers later
Today, more than 10,000 customers have ordered from Adaptonics. More than 25,000 orders have been documented.
Many of them are people who order from Adaptonics again and again.
I am proud of that. Above all, it shows me that a rather unusual idea has grown into something that clearly has value for many people.
The Healing Garden
The Healing Garden is more than a garden. It is my experimental laboratory.
Here I focus on Artemisia annua, Cistus, Pine Pollen, and adaptogens—while also exploring salutogenesis with increasing intensity.
From the very beginning, it wasn’t just about plants.
It was about self-efficacy, coherence, stress, adaptation, and the question of what conditions allow health to emerge in the first place.
An important influence on my work with salutogenesis was Dr. Fritz Helmut Hemmerich, today Friðhu, whom I have known for many years and with whom numerous conversations and videos were created in the early years of the Healing Garden.
Who is behind it?
I am Curro Cachinero.
I’ve been working with plants, health, salutogenesis, and adaptogens for many years. Not because I have an answer to everything—but because I want to understand it.
I’m particularly interested in the area between experience and science.
What do we know? What is well established? What is plausible? What have I experienced myself? And where do I simply have to say: We don’t know yet?
This distinction is more important to me today than ever.
Ten years become the Adaptopedia
By now, more than ten years of knowledge have accumulated at Adaptonics: articles, videos, interviews, scientific sources, experiences—and, of course, a few wrong turns.
Instead of letting this archive disappear, I’m currently revising it.
Old articles are being organized and supplemented with current sources. Related topics are linked to one another. And wherever the state of knowledge has changed, I say so.
That is how the Adaptopedia came about.
It doesn’t just tell you what I know today, but also how I got there.
What matters to me
I don’t believe in miracle products.
I believe in good plants, curiosity, experience, and sound science.
I believe in people’s ability to adapt, learn, and influence their own health.
And I believe that you’re allowed to change your opinion when you’ve learned something new.
Actually, you even have to.
Your Healing Garden Adaptonics :)