A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum Fruit Forum Can Slightly Breaking The Skin Of Fruits Be Bad?

Hi,
I am currently working on a project in which I will be extracting the juice out of various fruits with a .2 mm thick needle, and I was wondering if there were any possible adverse consequences from doing this? I will be using a syringe, and as the skin will be slightly ruptured for a few minutes from extracting the juice, could this opening possibly allow unwanted bacteria to fill in and cause the future consumer of the fruit harm? I would really appreciate your comments because this information will play a pivotal role in the functionality of my project.
Thanks.
-Zslavitz

Welcome, Zslavitz
Yes, it will harm the fruit for future use. Don't do this to fruit that will be sold or left on the tree. The wound left will not close up even if it appears invisible. Even a hypodermic needle into skin is an open wound and why it is cleaned before and after an injection.

Thank you Tina, but I have one more question.
Because I am trying to extract some of the juice from a fruit, ie. a pear, and then test its ph, I understand why leaving the little opening exposed could be bad, but is it really that bad? If you look at my attached picture you will notice that there is a pear that has a little gash in it, but yet it is still marketable. When I ran a little test and poked a pear with a needle, sure enough the next day a little brown spot had formed. Now, this seems pretty trivial in comparison to the gash, but why is my test still so bad? Are there any possible solutions that I could run over the pear that would "heal" the "wound" faster like with human skin? Is really impossible to extract some juice from a pear without contaminating the entire thing?
Thanks.
-Zslavitz

Picture of pears:

http://www.enews.org/velma/images/pears.jpg

If a pear or most fruits growing on a tree touch a branch or brush a branch in a breeze it can leave an abrasion on the skin which won't necessarily ruin the fruit.
But something penetrating through the skin and into the interior opens it to any thing looking for a home to grow in. And most fruit sugar content is a hospitable medium for many things.
Human skin is consistently regenerating. And performs an even more complex protective factor than does a simpler fruit skin.

I don't know of anything that could be applied that would heal the fruit skin.
Do you need to do this over a series of time and many fruit? If you only need one or two I would say go for it and experiment. And isolate it from the rest.