Dear MarthaMFI, I've read that in the fridge, potatoes convert their starch into sugar, thereby changing their taste.

Dear  Pat, I found a wire rack with perforations that I can put in the bin where I always had been keeping my potatoes, to circulat e air.  Thanks ever so much for having so advised me!  Yours in Him, Deb

 Using a wire rack is a great idea, Deb! You're more than welcome to any small bit of advice I may have. 

Dear Pat, Your "small bit" of advice are worth their weight in silver!  (Just trying not to be too trite!)  Yours in Him, Deb

When I was a child, we raised all of our potatoes and would store several hundreds of pounds for as long as a year!  We would build a wooden frame and cover it with chicken wire.  We would attach rope to each of the four corners and hoist it up as high as we could in the barn.  (The other ends of the rope would be tied to the barn's rafters.)  Then we would place the potatoes, with a little dirt still clinging to them, on the frame in a single layer, making sure that the potatoes did not touch.  The main thing was to allow as much air circulation over, under, and around them as possible to "dry" them and, of course, storing them in the air kept the rats from feasting on them.  Whenever we needed potatoes, we would let down the frame, discarded the rotten ones, and utilize the rest.  It was a system that worked very well to keep us supplied with potatoes!  Hope this helps--Miss Paula in Texas   

 We stored potatoes on wooden shelves in an old cistern and they kept all year. In the late spring our potatoes were in better shape than the ones in the store. 

There's a difference in what you grow yourself and what you buy at the store, though. Commercially handled potatoes are washed right away and then subjected to fairly cold temperatures, stored and transported packed together, so they don't keep as well no matter what you do with them.  

The few potatoes I grow now are eaten fast enough I don't have to worry about storing long term.  

I know you aren't suppose to store them in the fridge but we just don't go though many.  Unless it is the middle of winter they just don't keep out of the fridge.  I get my scalloped potato fix at the inlaws.  use frozen fries.   I am the only one who likes baked potatoes.  mashed potatoes etc they aren't fond of either. plus we eat lots of mashed potatoes at the inlaws too.    of course the older they get the more will have to eat!

 I've found that market-fresh potatoes keep much better than store-bought, and at least here actually cost less. As another poster mentions, the immediate washing of store potatoes and then the cold-storage changes their flavor and consistency, but also makes them more prone to sprouting. I keep locally grown (which is nice, because we can also just buy in whatever quantity we want to) stored in a wooden crate on the bottom of my pantry shelves (which are open shelves in my kitchen) covered with a dark, light cotton cloth. The bottom of the crate has a layer of newspaper. They keep for months without sprouting.

I, too, was raised on a farm and we always kept out potatoes in the root cellar. They would last for up to a year, and the most dreaded task we were given if we'd been naughty would be to go eye the potatoes! Unfortunately, we live in an apartment now, so no root cellar for us. 

Thank you so much, Martha MFI, & Falcon in Burgundy, for your very helpful comments.  I'm still goign to try the system that Pat suggested & I modified, to put them in a dark bin on a wire rack.  If that doesn't work -- which I won't know for a while -- t hen I'lllll pick up one of your suggestions.  Yours in Him, Deb 

I suspect Pat's system, and your mods, will work out really well. It sounds like all of our storage has the same general principle behind it: dark, cool, airflow.

Let us know how it goes!