Leon, you took me back 30 years! I don't have vegetable garden now other than a couple of tomato plants. But I grew up on a farm where we did that and even a few years after being first married, we stored potatoes in the basement on a wooden framed table.
One of the things that we also did after initially storing the potatoes was to go through them and inspect them to see if there were any that might be rotting. You don't want to find a rotten one with maggots on it! Yuk!
You covered two of my very favorite vetegables, onions and potatoes. Now I want to make a big pot of potato soup!