The power of cover crops

After all I've said, you'll understand why I am becoming a fan of cover crops. They keep dogtooth away, they seem to keep the soil decently uncompacted, they pump root exudates into the soil all year round...and they can give a harvest.

Some people call them green manures and they use them to fertilize the ground. They cut them before they flower so that all the nitrogen and other nutrients are in the plants and do not go to the seed. I'm more of a fan of keeping them in the ground for longer. I have enough land to do that, I don't need to clear all my space for veggies in early spring. This way, they stay on the plot for their whole cycle and their potential to feed the soil is fully used. This way, I don't need special techniques (rolofaca and all) to kill the cover crops and transition to my summer plantings. At harvest you produce seed and straw. After harvesting them, the cover crops also tend reseed spontaneously because a lot of seed falls onto the ground anyways. In a veggie garden context , if reseeding is not wanted, new plants can be removed with no hassle.

I am planning to also experiment in directly seeding veggies into cover crops which have not flowered yet. I don't have any special equipment to kill the cover crop but a hoe will do for small surfaces. The plan is to create rows of bare soil and accumulate the dead cover crops plants on the sides of those rows. I will then plant on those rows directly with the minimum soil preparation I can get away with.

So, in essence, why cover crops are so good, what sets them apart from other grasses? I've been thinking deeply on this and my understanding is still not complete because I still need more practical experience, in particular of transitioning to a veggie crop after the green manure, but what I think it boils down to is that they are easy to control:

• they have an annual cycle that can be interrupted before they set seed (if we want)
• They have a localized root system (no rhyzomes) that can be removed reasonably easily and keeps the ground under it in a good state (aerated and flowable)
• For barley: since it has a big seed, its spread from seed is not "humongously" invasive (like for example amarath or chenopodium): it regrows only on areas where it was grown before for a full cycle

Another "magical property" that these cover crop mixtures seem to have is that if they are seeded at the right moment they seem to outcompete everything. Is it only my impression or they can really displace dogtooth which was already present on the ground with its network of rhizomes? I'll have to keep my investigations going...

As you might have noticed I'm keeping an eye on some spontaneous grasses as well to see if they can be controlled the way I want just like a cover crop, and then try to favor them. Why buy (or bother growing) seed if there are already species present which can do the job?