I just joined so that I could specifically ask this question, and because I love to garden, of course!

So, this is my first year with a full garden and I didn't account for as much room as I now need. My cucumber plants and my squash plants have more or less intermingled themselves over the course of 2 months. As you all may know, the cucumber vine is just overtaking everything, but it's manageable.

The problem is that my cucumbers look like squash, they are tapered at one end and a pale yellow/green color. They smell like cucumbers and they taste like cucumbers (maybe a little more mild than usual) but I swear, they look like squash!

The internet says the two plants can't cross pollinate, but I feel I may be a good candidate to debunk that. Take a look at the photos below, both are from the same cucumber vine. I know it may be hard to believe, but I'm so new at this that I couldn't make it up! Help!! What's happening???

Incomplete pollination was the answer on another thread I saw this morning. Someone else may have a different answer for you.

It's very interesting, but I'm afraid your theory of cross-pollinating isn't the answer. Even if they did cross, i.e. bees carried pollen from squash to cucumber, or the other way around, the vines wouldn't immediately make fruit that was the result of the cross. The seeds inside your cucumbers or squash would be the combination of the two. So you'd have to let a fruit (either squash or cucumber) mature all the way to brown and dry, so the seeds were mature and then plant those seeds to get the result of the cross-pollination.

I think probably incomplete pollination is the problem. Those light green cukes look like the Armenian type. Do you know what type you bought? Or did you start them from seed, and still have the seed packet.

Anyway, to get complete pollination, try brushing some pollen from a mature male flower (with pollen visible and no fruit behind it) to a female flower (has a baby fruit on the stem behind it) using a little artist's paint brush. Be sure you pollinate cukes to cukes, and squash to squash. It's easy to tell the flowers apart because the squash flowers will be a lot bigger.

😁 and
Incomplete pollinazation.
The deformed ones, pick off, early. You can eat them, but being white, they probably will taste ! BLAH !!!
The two green ones look great 😜.
Butt !!! From pic, maybe a little to mature might have to de-seed them
Pick when about 2 inches diameter, then seeds will be edible.
Happy Gardening
😎😎😎

They look like Armenium cucumbers that are:

1. Not being completely pollinated

2. Are being picked too late.

Cucumbers and squash don't cross pollinate AND (as previously mentioned) wouldn't show indications of that this season anyway. Now, corn... lets talk about that.

I was surprised by the same issue this summer as my Straight Eight cucumbers, planted amongst squash plants, began taking on the form of a crookneck squash. Is there any other explanation?

The basic explanation still holds. But if you are intermingling the cucumber and squash, then obviously, bees will be spreading both types all about. It is conceivable that the wrong pollen in quantity might interfere with good pollination with the right pollen. So it is not a good idea to mix the two types. There shouldn't be a perceivable problem with planting cucumbers and squash next to each other, but don't let the vines intermingle.