Cover cropping with Medicago Arabica or Speckled Medock

I couldn't find info about this topic so i decided to make my own. At first i hated this clover, because it was so explosive i tried to eradicate it from the garden, but as Permies are probably familiar with, slowly i learned to love it. So much so by now that i'm actively saving the seeds and planning to use it in experimenting with on a newly piece of soil i try to take into production. The farmer i farm with is slowly retiring and as things stand with constantly broken tractors the supply with manure is all but sure. Anyway cow manure is a temporary fix and cannot be scaled up as i want it to be, so i'm slowly moving into cover cropping. As this plant is local and normally perfectly adapted to my context i see it as  a mojaor candidate. i have experimented with white clover, but find it rather dominating at times, suffocating my crops. Red clover is better behaved. But what i really like about Speckled Medock or Medicago Arabica is that it is so explosive in spring that i covers almost a square meter or 11 square foot. It just quietly grows over the winter. I suspect it represses grasses somewhat but not the taller plants that i have growing all over my chaos beds like parsnips and goats beard. It just seems to creep around them to not waste time killing them, but reach as far as it possibly can deposing seeds richly as it does. It's so explosive i'm sure it must have a superb root system full of nitrogen fixing bacteria. And then it's quite easy to remove. It grows from a center that i can break off to pull all the spreaded branches away in one go. Leaving the roots in the soil. I'm watching it now for growing back, but literature about it is saying it's an annual to be seeded in autumn.
Besides that i find it incredulous that there's not a ton more research done by the universities that are supposed to work for us making this world a better place, not much research has been done into this amazing plant. So i'm happy to hear if any fellow Permies have some experience with this plant even if they haven't tried to grow it out.
My thinking is that i'm going to dry the seeds this year, as i have started to be seen in the pictures below. I'm planning on deliberately spreading them on a new plot i am growing. As it is already devided into strips i'll grow different mixes. One pure, the next more other plants, the next even more. The more differing species a soil contains the more biodiversity one can expect to find in the soils. If people seem keen i can dig up a documentary about this and post it here.

So this is how an infested bed looks. Big plants not bothered. After ten minutes I had a wheelbarrow full of the stuff. I separated it sifting through some coarse self made siff. Then it still was a big mess because I had scraped soil of the same size in because the ground was covered in seeds. But I found out they floated so that made it easy to separate. But hen the seeds were wet so I had to improvise a set up for drying them. The plants are hanging somewhere in a barn on a rack. Many more will become available.

Ooh and this is a pic of the piece of land I try to make fertile without much inputs. Tree lines have been planted.
I dumped a few rolls of rotten straw the cattle ranger forgot to collect and let it kill off most grasses. Then raked it into path ways and sowed winter rye. I was hoping to crimp it in May and seed pumpkins in there, but it was way to small then and suddenly too big. So now I seeded potato's and maxima and moschata in the walking pathways that I hope will cover the land when I harvest. But maybe if snails have them I'll just leave it like is till autumn and then scythe it down and sow mixes.

I'd be very happy to find a nitrogen fixing winter cover crop. Most suggestions wouldn't grow much before we lose the light levels here, so I tend to rely on weeds and seaweed mulch (which I never got round to last year). I had the same thing with white clover being to vigorous in my polytunnel, I put it down to being a non native variety, as my local white clover seems much better behaved.
Maybe because the seed collection is difficult as the plant is lower growing, that makes it a less useful variety so got eliminated from research at an earlier stage. If it works for you I say go for it!

Although it was very difficult to germinate from saved seed, I'm having better results with transplanted local hop clover (also, I think, a Medicago).

It's gone through the winter well, and is now well grown & flowering for me.

I'm also seeing decent results with locally collected red & white clover seed as an overwinter cover crop.

So I'm hoping to expand the beds I'm using them in, this year

Corn salad is working well as a combined crop & winter cover for me too.

Polycultures & year-round or self-seeding cover crops are my current way of thinking.

The floating trick for seed separation is clever, hadn't thought of that. I've had similar love-hate relationships with self-seeding cover crops, the point where you stop fighting them and start working with them is always a turning point. Curious how the potato and squash experiment goes in those pathways, that's an interesting way to use what would otherwise be dead space.

I have seeded the Speckled Medock yesterday in a mix with some old lettuces i found a box of, wilder parsnips, some old amaranth. Rains they keep saying are coming.
The potatos did quite alright, still green, the thicker the layer of mulch and the more soaked the soils were the better they shine. But this has been an absolute brutal year for gardening, mostly everything failed, got stunted or is scribbly. So i am happy to announce that quite some of the moschata/maxima in the pathways popped up and some didn't got eaten and have survived with a few drops of water on my behalf. It is hard to see on the photo though.
I have found another candidate to add to the mix, it's flowering now, it has this typical red when young the turning yellow flower.. Maybe somebody knows it's name, but it has survived on the few drops that the rain provided this scorching summer.

Hugo Morvan wrote:I have found another candidate to add to the mix, it's flowering now, it has this typical red when young the turning yellow flower.. Maybe somebody knows it's name, but it has survived on the few drops that the rain provided this scorching summer.

It does look very happy! Could it be birdsfoot trefoil? It seems unlikely, as that thrives in my damp climate, but that is what it looks like to me.

And, that is what it is!