Apr 13, 2026
By Stephanie Eckroat
On any given spring day in central Kansas, you might find a small bus tucked into a parking lot, its shelves lined with pretty greens and curious customers stepping on board. It’s not public transit; it’s a traveling plant shop, and at the wheel is Renata Goossen, the Plant Bus Lady.
Goossen, a sixth-generation Kansan from the Flint Hills, is the kind of person who could talk about plants all day and often does. After earning her horticulture degree from Kansas State University, she had options. Many of her classmates packed up for jobs on the coast, especially during the uncertainty of the COVID-era job market. But Goossen felt a pull in a different direction: back home.
She saw opportunity not somewhere else, but right where she started. Her family’s land, rich with prairie grasses and history, became both her inspiration and her responsibility.
“Our family has this beautiful rangeland,” Goossen says. “I wanted to make sure it’s here for generations to come.”
Instead of stepping into an established career, she built one, quite literally, on wheels.
Her colorful bus, just 24 feet long, is small enough to slip easily into parking lots and outside local businesses. But what it lacks in size makes up for in personality. Inside, it’s packed with carefully grown plants and the kind of one-on-one interaction you won’t find at a big-box store.
That personal connection didn’t come easily at first.
“The first year was hard,” Goossen says. “I had to learn everything — where to go, who my customers were, what they wanted.”
In those early days, she relied on sheer determination, sometimes standing outside her bus inviting people in with a simple pitch: “Hey, want to come see what I have?”
Five years later, she doesn’t have to ask twice. Her customer base now follows her schedule listed on her website, showing up at her regular pop-ups across Sedgwick, Harvey, Sumner, Marion and Butler counties.
Long before the bus hits the road each spring, though, the real work is already underway. Back on her family’s farm, her greenhouses come alive in the dead of winter. December and January are for planting tiny seeds that will become spring vegetables and flowers.
By the time the season peaks, Goossen is hosting up to seven pop-ups a week leading up to Mother’s Day, one of her busiest times of year.
Her family is woven into every part of the business. Her dad helped build the greenhouse and designed the shelving inside the bus, while her mom has become a familiar face to customers, helping manage crowds on busy weekends in her unofficial role as “Bus Bouncer.”
As the calendar turns toward summer, Goossen’s focus shifts. The bus begins to carry more native plant species that have long thrived in the Flint Hills. Many of these start with seeds she gathers herself.
For Goossen, this isn’t just about selling plants, it’s about honoring the landscape.
“You can buy seeds online,” she says. “But plants adapt to their environment. If they’re growing and reproducing here in southcentral Kansas, they’re going to be the best fit for people growing here.”
It’s a philosophy rooted in what she calls purposeful gardening — growing with intention, supporting pollinators and building a deeper relationship with the land.
“I love native plants,” she says. “They help people connect to where they live in a really meaningful way.”
When colder weather returns, the bus doesn’t go quiet. Instead, it is filled with dried flowers and houseplants, something Goossen didn’t expect to love at first.
Now, she sees them differently.
“Houseplants are a great entry point,” she explains. “They get people interested in gardening who might not have tried it otherwise.”
Despite her success, Goossen has made a conscious decision to keep her focus narrow. Space on the bus is limited, so she sticks to what she does best: plants. She encourages customers to shop locally for everything else: potting soil, fertilizers and tomato cages.
“I don’t want to be a competitor,” she says. “I want to complement other local businesses and focus on education.”
That mindset has led to collaborations, including a regular pop-up with Reverie Coffee Roasters. Together, they’ve created something more than a shopping stop; it’s an experience. Customers know they can grab a coffee and a plant in one visit and the partnership helps both businesses grow.
Running her own small business has reshaped Goossen’s perspective.
“I didn’t realize how important local businesses were until I became one,” she says. “Now it affects how I shop, how I think about community.”
Looking ahead, she’s expanding beyond the bus. She’s launching a podcast, “Call the Plant Bus Lady,” later this June, aimed at sharing her horticulture knowledge across the region. She also has a website, https://www.renatasgarden.com/, where customers can explore a catalog of more than 120 varieties of native and edible plants.
Her YouTube channel, Renata's Garden, offers even more ways for people to learn, with bonus content that will be tied to the podcast.
Still, at the center of it all is the same simple idea that brought her back to Kansas in the first place: helping people grow.
“People can grow their own food,” she says. “And there’s nothing more rewarding than growing it yourself and eating it off your own plant.”
In a world increasingly driven by convenience and scale, Goossen’s work stands as a reminder that meaningful connections — to the land, to food and to each other — can still grow from something as simple as a seed.
And sometimes, they arrive on a little bus parked just around the corner.
Want to learn more about Renata? Check out her feature in Kansas Living.