What directions do bananas grow? gophers

I am new to growing bananas, and I have to plant gopher-repelling plants around the banana.  I know it will have pups, and there will eventually be a grandmother, mother and daughter.  I'm hoping they will go in a line so I can plant the gopher-repelling plants in the right place.

Is that how they usually happen?  Or is it more of a circular pattern?  

Do the pups "travel" as the years go on so that the original plant might be 4 feet away from where the pups are headed?  So I need to plan on a large area for the banana to migrate through?

Usually I put a chicken wire basket around the rootball of large perennials, then the gopher repelling plants, and the chicken wire gives maybe 6-9 months of protection while the bulbs or repelling plants are growing nearby.  

My favorite gopher-repelling plants, that have worked for me are, in case anyone's interested:

asparagus
daylilies
dock weed
daffodil bulbs put very closely together
narcissis bulbs
elephant garlic  (least fussy of all the garlics, especially good in dry clay, and even in wet clay)

Each pseudostem lasts for about two years before it either blooms and dies or it loses vigor and dies.  Meanwhile one or more suckers comes up next to each existing pseudostem and repeats the process.  Over time, the banana mat dies out in the center where the original transplant was started, forming a slowly expanding ring of pseudostems.

Thanks, Mike.  

So it's going to grow outward like the rings on a pond if you throw a pebble in the water?  I have seen people cutting away some of those pups and transplanting them, so maybe that would limit the direction?  

Or does it really need all of them that it puts out?

Can you transplant the pups?

It doesn’t need all of the pups, you propagate it by digging up and transplanting some of the pups.  Separate the pup from the mother plant when it gets about 2 feet tall and do all of your transplants early enough in the growing season so that they can get well established before any cold weather sets in in the fall.

Sounds like you can some what control the direction of expansion via transplanting.

in my experience, there is no way to predict exactly where the pups are going to pop up. i've only had bananas for about 4 years on this plot though- ask me again in 20.
you can easily dig out and transplant the pups though. i take them out WAY before 2 feet tall, although i don't have hard freezes to worry about.

the standard procedure here, though, is to chop the mother after it bears fruit or the pup appears, for the reasons Mike says. The mother stem might struggle along for a bit but it's not going to be healthy, so really there's not much need to transplant the pups unless you're trying to move them farther away or someplace specific (or, um, steal to put in your own garden).

Thanks, guys.  

That gives me a good idea about how it might go.  There does seem to be a wait-and-see component here, and I guess the asparagus will be easy enough to move around if I guess wrong.  It probably can grow right past the garlic if it wants to.

I'm thinking, too, that it will expand towards the sun to some extent, so I'll consider that in planting the gopher barrier.

I did see a thing on YouTube about using the finished banana trunk, they called it a banana log, as a hugel component, and even settle it into the ground and cover it with leaves/cuttings, etc., let it rot down, so that seems like a great addition to the process.

I had about 1000 stems of bananas for a few years in the Dominican Republic - growing from "sepas" - the root bulbs - that had been established up to a couple of decades. When a person decides that a banana-growing area must be moved or eliminated, the sepas must be excavated. Well-established mother-sepas could be three feet deep and weigh nearly 100 pounds, but more commonly they are about the size of a basketball. all the tendril-like roots are cut away and the sepa can often be split or quartered and each piece will re-grow in fertile moist soil. Experienced Dominican farmers would whittle the sepa down to an essential "core" with no remaining brown outer skin remaining, but I never learned how to recognize what is the essential bit and what can be safely removed, alas. The advantage of whittling down was simply to lighten the load when carrying a sack full of sepas for planting in a new field.

In a place where bananas are growing, the rule of thumb was always to cut down a pseudo stalk growing between two others. That keeps the pseudostalks spread apart: they seem to do best when the spacing is six feet or more. When they bloom, the "apple" will expose a series of rows of blooms that become individual hands on the bunch. After a bloom row fails to produce fruits, the remainder of the apple can be cut off and it is edible in various recipes. Furthermore, removing the apple leaves more of the pseudostalk's nutrient reserve for producing fruit. But I prefer to leave them blooming because various birds in our area will use their nectar.

If the pseudostalk of your bananas is tall - some of mine grow over 20 feet - harvesting a bunch intact can be problematic. The technique is to judge which way the stalk will want to fall - usually in the direction of the bunch - and cut a tall skinny "X" into the stalk on this face with a machete. The diagonals of the X will be about two feet long and cut into the stalk at least a couple of inches. Then an old dry leaf can be grasped and tugged to help the stalk fall toward the X. The uncut side opposite the X will become a hinge and the X-cut side will crush - easing the fall so the bunch does not smash to pulp when it reaches the ground.

Cade, thanks for the details.  I hope mine get this far along, and I'll be glad to have this info handy!