I have decided that the cucumbers that look like teensy watermelons have to be eaten fresh or made into sour/dill  pickles.  They just don’t work with sugar.

The jar on the right is dill pickles.

The jar on the left is sweet pickle raisins that are too hard to use in anything.  I tried simply pouring boiling sweet pickle solution over them rather than going through the “tenderizing” procedure that ordinary cucumbers require.  That was no more effective than using the original method I learned from my grandmother.