Trick for helping onions, apples, potatoes & sweet potatoes stay fresh longer!

Here is a handy little trick to help some of your produce stay fresh longer.  Keep onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes and apples in baskets in a dark cool place.  (I keep them in my pantry, pictured here, that usually has the door closed so it's dark)  These kinds of produce need to "breath" so a basket works great for that and it looks cute.  I like to buy a bag of potatoes and put half in the basket in my pantry and leave the other half in the bag they come in and put that in my basement storage room so I can bring them up when I use up what's in my basket.  A dark basement storage room is even better than a pantry but if I kept all  of these produce items down there I would forget to use them! Make sure that the onions and potatoes are NOT together or even sitting next to each other as they will cause each other to go bad faster.  However, if you add an apple to your sweet potato and potato basket the apple will help the potatoes not sprout as quickly!  Pretty cool, huh?  I find my potatoes and onions last about 1 month or a little longer, and apples and sweet potatoes last 2 months or more.  This will vary depending on the climate where you live.  When I lived in Hawaii produce would spoil much faster, which makes it more challenging, but these tricks still work, just expect shorter amounts of time!  You can also use baskets for garlic and shallots but I usually handle my garlic other ways and will write a post about that soon.

Left to right: onions, apples (I put half in the basket and half in the fridge and when we finish those we put the rest from the basket into the fridge), potatoes (with 1 apple) and sweet potatoes.