The Clever Place You Never Thought To Store Your Produce

With the rising cost of groceries, it's more important than ever to ensure that pricier items like fresh produce last as long as possible. Though it's an uphill battle to completely avoid the occasional moldy package of berries or sprouted potatoes, sticking to guidelines around where to store fresh fruit and vegetables helps prevent early spoilage and protects your grocery budget. This is particularly important for produce that does best outside of the refrigerator, like potatoes, bananas, onions, avocados, and any fruit that won't ripen in cold temperatures.

Of course, being unable to tuck certain fruits and veg away in your fridge presents a different problem — the issue of counter space. While it's easy to keep your counters fairly clear by corralling non-refrigerated produce in bowls and baskets, they can still get in the way when you're trying to use larger appliances or prepare big meals. Additionally, onions, potatoes, and fresh garlic are more prone to sprouting unless they're literally kept in the dark.

The simplest way to solve both of these problems at once is by ditching the baskets altogether and tossing this kind of produce into your kitchen drawers. These areas provide the prescribed cool, dark, dry environment to keep unrefrigerated fruits and veggies fresh while also keeping your counter free of extra clutter. This storage technique may also allow you to store more of your favorite sweet potatoes and Vidalia onions, as most kitchen drawers offer more storage space than a simple woven basket or fruit bowl.

When using your kitchen drawers to store produce, it's important to understand how different fruits and veggies will react to certain environments and to each other. For instance, a common mistake that can make your fruits and veg spoil faster is storing produce anywhere near appliances like your oven, dishwasher, or fridge, as all of them emit both moisture and heat. This will create a warm, humid climate inside the drawers, which is the perfect condition for your produce to rot, become moldy, and even facilitate a fruit fly invasion.

Instead, choose drawers well away from these areas and close to the floor, as hot air rises. You might also want to line each drawer with parchment paper to contain debris and keep your drawers cleaner. There's also a right way to store fresh produce together, which sometimes involves keeping certain items separated from each other. For instance, onions and potatoes will cause each other to sprout if stored side by side, so they should be kept in separate drawers, as should apples and bananas unless you're trying to turn green bananas yellow and sweet faster.

Something else to consider is the airflow inside your drawers. While a closed environment may help preserve the temperature for root veg, things like citrus and melons give off lots of ethylene (a plant hormone that causes fruits to ripen). To prevent excess ethylene buildup, consider outfitting your drawer fronts with mesh or latticework to help keep these more delicate items from spoiling too quickly.