I have an idea I am trying out, but I will listen if it's been done before or if it's a bad idea.
I have a few vegetable ferments going right now, kraut, salsa, celery, and garlic. They are all at different stages, with the salsa just gone into the fridge.
So I took a tsp of salsa liquid and put it in a jar of water with a tbsp of sugar mixture I keep for water kefir. That jar has been on the counter all day and I just now decided to put in a little bit of the cabbage fermenting liquid.
My thought is that it will form a starter like a ginger bug or a fruit starter, but for vegetables. My further idea is that if I keep adding a little bit of everything I ferment, the new, wild, and hopefully different strains of bacteria will accumulate. So that after a while I have a multispecies wild ferment starter. And if I keep using a small amount of that starter in every batch of veggies, I get a wider selection in all my jars.
Objections I thought of are that:
1) I might pass on bad bacteria/mold
2) The dominant bacteria in the starter will out compete new wild strains and I might end up with just one strain anyway.
3) There just aren't that many different strains on common veggies to make it worth the effort.
Any comments or thoughts?