Bananas make lots of little pups around the edges of a clump. I used to only plant these, or plant big stalks in the ground, leaves and all.

Here’s a recently planted banana pup:

But there is another way to plant bananas. That entails taking a large “tree” and chopping it down to a stump, then planting the stump where you want to establish a new clump of bananas. They call this a “bullhead:”

See that stump? And the little shoots emerging from the sides?

I busted apart a clump of bananas and planted both pups and a few bullheads, and from what I’ve seen, the bullheads do even better than the pups, growing quickly into small trees, like this one:

Note the remains of a bullhead stump beside that shoot. It seems there’s a lot of energy stored in the root of a decapitated stump, so when you take it and plant it out, it creates one or two strong shoots and sends them for the sky.

Banana clumps need to be divided and moved about regularly for maximum fruit production, otherwise you’ll end up with a big thicket of banana stalks with only a few fruits here and there.

Here’s more on bananas: