Year of the Cucumber?

Last year it was courgettes (zucchini) that threatened to bury us. This year we have them under control, but we've have a mountain of cucumbers...

Some of the plants we bought as seedlings from the Tabua market; others are grown from Japanese seeds. (Japanese cucumbers are small and quite straight, perhaps 3 cm round and 15 cm long. Portuguese cucumbers are fatter and up to about 30 cm long; pretty much the size of large courgettes.) The strange thing is that the results -- both from Japanese and local plants -- look like the cucumbers we can buy in the market here. I wonder if it is soil or weather that determines the size and shape of a cucumber as much as the variety?

The problem with cucumbers is that they do not keep and nor do they freeze. (Now that we have a larger chest freezer, we are able to deal with the tomato and courgette harvest...) So the focus of bottling this past few weeks has been the cucumbers. I've done some like American-style dill pickles (though with fennel leaves rather than dill, as these are are commonly available around here) using both sliced cucumbers and small, immature ones. I've also done some chopped and some as a kind of green pickle/relish. Now we're running out of ideas. But just in time to save us from a tedious diet someone has asked if we can provide cucumbers for a local Green Gathering event this coming weekend. I expect we'll get paid for any we send over -- but we are hardly going to get rich selling a couple of kg during the peak of the season....