If you love homemade pickles, you've got to know your cucumbers. There's the salad cucumber, with dark-green, heavily waxed skins; you'll find them piled beside other salad ingredients at the supermarket.
They have seedy centers; they're watery and mild in flavor. No good for pickles.Then there are those deluxe English cucumbers (sometimes labeled "burpless"). These are shrink-wrapped in plastic instead of waxed to keep moisture within the thin skins; no peeling is necessary for these more expensive salad cukes. Still no good for pickling.
Finally, there are true pickling cucumbers - short and curved; rather warty; and strongly flavored to stand up to dill, vinegar, mustard seeds and all those other ingredients in the pickling brine.
This variety of cucumber is seasonal; usually we have to wait for a July or August harvest.