Best place to store potatoes to keep them fresh named and it’s not the cupboard or pantry

Potatoes may be a kitchen essential, but keeping them fresh for more than a few weeks can prove surprisingly difficult

Potatoes are among the most versatile vegetables around. Whether you’re after a classic Sunday roast, a hearty potato salad or simple sausage and chips, it’s always handy to have a few spuds tucked away.

Yet far too often, we head to the larder only to discover they have turned green and sprouted or, even worse, gone soggy and mouldy.

YouTuber Marandia Wright has a surprisingly straightforward, old-fashioned storage technique that could spare you from repeatedly binning bag after bag of rotten spuds. She explains: “Those of you who have grown potatoes know that, when you dig your potatoes up out of the dirt, you can put them in a cardboard box and just put them in a dark room.

“You can go and get them whenever you want them and they’re good all the way through until the next growing season,” she says on her Survival HT channel.

However, Marandia points out that shop-bought potatoes will rarely keep for more than a couple of weeks: “One of the major reasons is the plastic bag,” she says. “This thing sweats, it gets them wet, it starts them rotting and rot starts spreading.”

The solution, she explains, requires no costly equipment or specialist knowledge — in fact, she insists, “a toddler can do it.”

“This works with any kind of potato,” Marandia says. “Even sweet potatoes, and all you need is a box and some dirt.”

She explains that the first and most crucial step is to remove your potatoes from the plastic bag the moment you arrive home, as the humid environment inside encourages rot: “Another major reason,” Marandia says, “is because they have washed them.

“When you harvest [potatoes] yourself you do not wash them. You leave them in the original dirt, the original microbes, the things that they grew with are going to help to protect and to preserve them.”

Marandia says that you can restore shop-bought potatoes to a more natural condition simply by removing them from the bag and leaving them somewhere sheltered to dry out: “Make sure there’s no moisture on the skins,” she says, “and then all you have to do is get a cardboard box.”

The following step, she adds, is to gather some soil from your garden and leave it in direct sunlight for a day to make certain it’s completely dry. You won’t need a great deal of earth, Marandia says, just enough to give each potato a light coating.

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Finally, Marandia says, you should ensure each potato is kept apart from the others: “You can do this with newspaper by layering them: a potato layer and then a newspaper layer, then another newspaper layer.”

Should you not have sufficient newspaper to hand, she says, extra soil will do the trick, simply using a layer of earth to keep each potato separate.

With this straightforward age-old technique, you can keep a bag of shop-bought potatoes fresh for up to a year — that’s if you can resist tucking in!