Behind every garden there is said to lie a vision. It may be a hazy memory from childhood, a photograph in a pretty book or a memory enhanced by love on holiday in the south of France.

Sometimes I meet male corporate bulldozers who pat me on the back for continuing to write this column and tell me how much they enjoy gardening. They then settle down in their offices to savage anything that moves slowly. I cannot help wondering about the vision behind their gardens – a secretary, perhaps, on a meaningful picnic for two in very long grass in July?

Vegetable gardens rest on visions too, visions of rich greenery and carrots which grow straight. These visions are a fantasy if you live on a clay soil, in the centre of cities or anywhere within a three-mile radius of my own garden’s replica of the shingle on Dungeness Beach. If you do, my advice is quite different. Forget the soil at ground level. Put vegetables out of reach of it and think Tarmac. On it, arrange vegetables in pots, where you can control everything that happens to them. The aim here is to be extremely modern, subverting and deconstructing green gardeners’ rules of the game. You can never complain again that I write only for people with big country gardens, whose clocks have stopped in 1962. Here is how to design a vegetable garden on a new wave of modern realism.

First, concrete over the patch you wish to consecrate to vegetables. Then, draw four symbolic figures, one for each corner of your patch of fertility. In the upper right-hand corner, paint a pair of black-gloved hands seizing a supermarket basket in which the FT is showing the share price of J. Sainsbury plc. In the lower left, draw a badger, snarling, as one of them snarled at me on Good Friday when I brought it a saucer of inorganic milk. In the lower right, draw some distressed butterflies and a slug weeping with slime as it deconstructs. In the upper left, draw a frustrated rabbit, one with its paws and jaw tied in a bed of young lettuces.

The beauty of this design is that you can use it anywhere, even in small urban gardens, and you can vary the images to include your own worst enemies. When you have laid your concrete zone, place four very large cheap clay pots on its outer edges and fill them with the most exquisite ready-made, fertile compost. Coat their lower rims with Vaseline, which is an excellent defence against climbing slugs; you might consider a line of razor blades against any squirrels with ambition. Into each of the tubs, plant a very special variety of potato, and sow seeds of the excellent medal-winning Sytan variety of carrots, which has won merited awards from the Royal Horticultural Society. It has an excellent taste and is reasonably resistant to the dreaded carrot fly.

My latest volume of hot air on the subject is Organic Gardening by John Fedor, who gardens in northeast America. He claims that “mixing parsley and carrots deters carrot flies because of the masking aroma of the parsley”. Dream on, old boy. The flies still eat my carrots and Peter Rabbit polishes off the parsley, just as Beatrix Potter predicted.

I ought to explain my choice of supermarket imagery. In between the big pots you should put some smaller pots of good compost, which you can sow with seed of genuine spinach – not the type of beet, or beta vulgaris, that panders to modern supermarket customers’ penchant for unseasonable shopping. True spinach is a summer vegetable, which tends to flop if taken too far from home. It tastes of iron and dark green goodness. The beet impostor tastes of nondescript leaves and does not deserve the marketers’ ploy of calling it “French”. If you want proper spinach you have to grow your own, out of the reach of predators at ground level. I grow the strong Scenic F1 Hybrid, whose seed is available from Thompson & Morgan of Ipswich.

My other supermarket supplements are dill and chervil. They are two excellent herbs, which seldom turn up in the shops in those pots of hopeless peat. You have to sow them yourself, but they are extremely easy to grow. Dill makes rather thin-stemmed plants with finely cut little leaves, but it is the most excellent companion for ordinary farmed fish. The chopped leaves will even enliven sea bass that has never seen salt water. Its full name is Anethum gravolens and it is seldom as much as a foot high. Chervil, by contrast, is much too strongly flavoured for fish. It comes into its own when a few leaves are shredded and mixed into scrambled eggs. Few shops actually sell it, but it is extraordinarily easy to grow in a pot, even on a windowsill. Its botanical name is Anthriscus.

The centrepiece of my answer to the allotment has to be the bitter-leaved radicchio. It can be hard to find in supermarkets but this year Thompson & Morgan are offering seeds of an excellent early variety from Treviso in northern Italy. I value it because it is excellent in a particular recipe. Cut bits of radicchio into thin strips and cut a few slices of Parma ham into similar widths. Melt some unsalted butter and add a clove of squashed garlic and two tablespoons of chopped leaves from a rosemary bush. Put in half of the radicchio and half the Parma ham. Cook them very briefly and put to one side. Then, boil up some tagliatelle in salted water, drain it and add a bit more butter and some Parmesan cheese. Put in the cooked radicchio and ham and then add the rest and stir it around frantically. It is much better with your own fresh radicchio. The recipe is not mine, I owe it to the River Café cookbook Easy but I have eaten it six times in the past six months.

The crucial point is to realise that vegetables make the most excellent pot plants if you choose varieties carefully. The hazards at ground level are simply too great for most of us. Flies proliferate, rain is rare and the dreaded wildlife will eat whatever it can. Turn the old advice on its head and put flowers in your allotment and vegetables on a weed-free terrace beside the house.

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