Transplanting Asparagus for future sales of mature plants 1.17.23

 At the beginning of this video you can see some red Solo cups that I planted asparagus in 6 weeks ago.  They are up now and about 5 to 10 cm tall (2 to 4").  Today it's time to transplant them from the red cups to the blacks 1 liter nursery bags that will keep them for 2 or 3 years until I sell them as mature plants in Merida.    Then tomorrow we will repeat the process and plant new seeds in the red cups and transplant in about 6 weeks to the permanent bags.

Click here to view video of transplanting.

My goal is to have about 2,000 plants in bags each year, that I hope to sell in 3 years for about 500 pesos each ($25.00).   Then each year I will repeat the process and raise 2,000 more, so that starting in the 3rd year, I'll have 2,000 plants to sell retail each year or about 1,000,000 pesos per year in sales.   And additionally, I hope to harvest about 200 kg per day of spears to sell at the market in Oxkutzcab.

As I have previously written, asparagus produces nothing in edible spears the first year.  2 years from now they will make some, that we will cut and sell as part of our regular daily harvesting.  But in the 3rd year the plants produce an exponential increase in spears and that is when I'll sell them in Merida or other cities.   Most people are not willing to wait the 2 or 3 years to get the spears and if they buy two 3-year-old plants from me, they can begin enjoying spears every day of the week, as much as 2 adults would want to eat, with more to give away.

It's a no-lose proposition for me, because even if I fail to sell all 2,000 mature plants in a year, I can harvest the spears myself to sell at the Oxkutzcab market weekly.

The math is simple.  The seeds cost about a penny a piece or 5 for 1 peso.   The dirt, which I enrich myself with manure, bulls' blood, and 17-17-17 slow-release fertilizer costs me about 5 pesos.  The labor to plant in the solo cups in about 5 pesos each in labor.  The 1-liter bags cost about 5 pesos each and in one day, one hombre, at 300 pesos per day ($15.00) can transplant about 90 plants.  After transplanting, there is nothing to do except to water during the dry season and periodically add a tablespoon of 17-17-17 fertilizer.  Mr. Sun will do the rest.

I will keep the bags close to each other as shown below, for easy handling, watering, weeding and fertilizing.  It also allows me to move them, if needed to keep in partial shade to keep the hot Yucatan sun from beating down on them all day.

If you are interested in learning yourself, how to grow asparagus in Yucatan on your own farm or ranch, I invite you to come and visit me.  I will show you everything I know and be thrilled to help you eclipse me in production.  My goal in Yucatan is to try and raise as many Mayan people as I can out of poverty and asparagus is a crop you cannot harvest yourself in quantity.  You will have to employ helpers and if you do that, I'll multiply my efforts many-fold.  Asparagus is not something that we can saturate the market with.  Yucatan has been, and is, a net importer of asparagus, and we can sell all we can make.   Help me help others!