These days, our winters (at lat 52.48, so too little light for much to actively grow within a month of the solstice) vary between cool and wet, and some frost (occasionally to -10 C).
I also use a mixture of volunteer plants, green manure crops and organic mulches to keep the soil covered.
Because our winters tend to be relatively mild, we have some persistent overwintering deep rooting volunteer plants such as perennial grasses, dandelions, docken, bindweed, perennial thistles, creeping buttercup, hawkweed which I try to remove from cropping areas each growing season (the creeping grasses & bindweed are hardest to remove completely!)
I tolerate ragwort as I'm not making forage hay, so we get cinnabar moths.
Volunteer ground cover plants (with more or less spreading habit) which I love include various speedwells, our geranium: herb Robert, scarlet pimpernel, garden & woodland forget-me-not, chickweed and fat hen (the last two being good greens).
Plus we have a wonderful spreading woodland-type strawberry which came to me via my late Mum - her neighbour had weeded out a tiny seedling, which we thought looked like a true strawberry, and saved. It has stacks of tasty small fruit (pea to kidney bean size) from June, with a few coming as late as September! This is a good groundcover, and seems to actively deter creeping grasses, so that's great. It partners with the less strangling type of pink (field) bindweed we have
I tolerate field bindweed more: it is a good nectar flower, and spreads much more slowly than the larger white (hedge) bindweed.
Green manures I sow .. mostly phacelia / blue tansy from home saved seeds, which is half-hardy so only sometimes lives through our winters. Sow mid-Spring to late-Summer for us.
Mulch is biomass from the above plus Russian comfrey and clean sheets of cardboard where I'm trying to knock back perennial grasses and bindweed in growing beds, or it's too late in Autumn to establish living rooted cover.
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