I slice and chop them and freeze them to use in cooking. You do know that you can use Armenian cucumbers like actual cucumbers, especially if you don't let them get too large before you harvest them. So, if you have enough Armenian cukes at a usable size, you could chop or grate them and use them as the cucumber part of a cuke-pepper relish. If you let the Armenian cukes get too big, then you're attempting to use a more melon-like fruit as a cuke and that doesn't work well. Once they are too big to use like cukes, I use them as chicken treats.

We are still getting used to the Armenians. I have one that's pretty big. I don't eat much melon or cucumber. Ever since I was pregnant with #2 son, cukes and melons give me indigeston. Never bothered me before that. I plan to make a salad with the ones we have now. I'm thinking about doing a bread and butter pickling recipe on the banana peppers and putting them in winter salads. I will freeze any that are left. Thanks.

Grate cucumbers for relish?! I've never heard such a thing but I like it!!! How do they hold up? I would be really interested because I LOVE homemade relish. It's been years since I canned some and my taste palette has not been as happy when tasting relish since.

You've never had pickled cucumber relish? I made both dill pickle relish and sweet pickle relish this summer, and then I made Tim a relish that is like what my father used to call Chow-Chow. I just let the food processor chop, slice or grate them. It is such a time-saver.

Here's the recipe for pickled cucumber relish:

NCHFP Recipe--Pickle Cucumber Relish

And here's the one for Dill Pickle Relish:

NCHFP Recipe: Dill Pickle Relish

If you have fresh dill at the same time you have cucumbers, you can make this Fresh Dill Cucumber Relish:

Fresh Dill-Cucumber Relish

At this link from the NCHFP, there are tons of relish recipes, including sweet pepper relish, apple relish and onion relish (so yummy!). The recipe for Dixie relish here is the one I made for Tim that reminds him of my Dad's chow chow.

We were overrun by cucumbers. I made all kinds of fermented pickles, often with up to 4 batches of food fermenting at the same time (requiring lots of sticky notes to remind me which batch was on which day) and all kinds of regular pickles and quick pickles and relishes, finishing up the season with cinnamon pickles (aka mock apple rings) and even when I was through, the cucumber plants weren't so I fed a lot of pickling cukes to the chickens. It was probably the best cucumber year ever. I don't know how we'll ever eat all the pickles I made, but I have noticed that once we open a jar, it doesn't last long so I expect we'll manage to gobble them up much more quickly than I think.

So I have 2 sweet banana pepper plants. Seeds from the same package. I know one of them Is a sweet pepper. I cut some up tonight for a salad. It was NOT sweet. It was hot. Of course the hot one was the one covered with peppers. So I guess the pickles I made will be hot. But it didn't make my hand burn when I made pickles, it did tonight. Do they get hotter within the same season? I will probably toss that seed pack. Hate to grow all season only to discover it's not the right type.

AmyinOwasso, Most Banana peppers are not at all hot but I think there is a variety that does have some heat I disremember what it is called, but it could be a cross of some kind. But don't toss it you might decide you like the taste of the pickled peppers. I like to eat the Butter Round crackers & cheese with peppers. If it is a Banana pepper it shouldn't be any hoter than the Anaheim peppers which have only a enough heat to taste. I like them better than the real hot kind. Or you could make some jelly with them, which is good on toast and not bad mixed with peanut butter.

There's always been an open-pollinated hot banana pepper that I've always just known as hot banana pepper. There's also Hungarian Wax peppers which are medium-hot and look very similar to hot banana peppers. New on the market the last couple of years are some new peppers that are a cross between hot banana peppers and Hungarian wax peppers. Two of those new banana pepper/Hungarian hot wax pepper hybrid varietie/s that I grew this year are Inferno (yes, it is hot) and Hot Sunset. I brought some of both of those to the Spring Fling. If yours is from a seed packet that was supposed to be sweet banana peppers, then either the seed got crossed in the commercial seed production fields and they raised a new crop the next year from saved/crossed seed, or hot banana pepper seeds got mixed somehow with sweet banana pepper seeds, either when peppers were harvested for seed production or when the peppers were processed at the seed facility. My dad always grew both hot and sweet banana peppers and didn't bother to separate them when he harvested them and brought them indoors, so those of us who only wanted to eat sweet banana peppers had to carefully taste a small bite before taking a big bite.