Orange cucumbers? What went wrong?

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I planted 2 baby cucumbers several weeks ago. They started off looking mainly green with some yellow stripes in them. I thought at the time, it was a matter of time before they would turn green. I couldn't have been more wrong. The thing was, they were already getting past the ripe stage and would continue to turn from green and yellow to bright orange and today I picked 3 of them, very orange in color because they were several weeks old. I read an article or two about this and discovered that cucumbers should be picked when green after they have had a chance to grow a bit after a good rain. They should not be allowed to just remain indefinitely on the vine or they would get orange and apparently many people discard the ones that are over the ripe stage. I am a novice gardener so I didn't know anything about growing cucumbers. My wife saw these and was under the impression they were some kind of different vegetable altogether, but I read the following article and discovered that I had just let them grow too long. I found one small green cucumber and cut it off the vine and it is the only one that looks like a real cucumber but it is not nearly as large as the other three. I certainly learned a valuable lesson from all of this. Next time I will pick them much earlier and not wait for them to look like something grown on Mars.