Sweet Melissa's, a popular salad eatery that started in Boardman in 2017, has since expanded to Columbiana and Howland, is raving about their lettuce. Melissa Poland, the owner of the local franchise, says they've been working with a local farm in Sharon to get the key vegetable, aquaponic lettuce.
"There is nothing put on this lettuce as far as any kind of pesticides, or any spray. It is the best lettuce I can get my hands on," said Poland. Unlike field-grown lettuce, much of which is grown during the cool season on the west coast of the United States, Aquaponic lettuce is grown indoors. It combines hydroponics, plants that are grown in water, with aqua culture.
That culture includes fish like Tilapia and Coy, whose waste is filtered into nitrate, or food for plants like lettuce. WestWinn Urban Ag near Clark Street in Sharon grows more than 25,000 sq. ft of lettuce, and other plants inside an old industrial building where torpedoes were once manufactured during WWII.
"We use living fish in a recirculating system to constantly replenish fertilizer and if we need fertilizer, we just increase or decrease our fish food." said Robert Studor, aquaponics manager for WestWinn Urban Ag.
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