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A visit to Noci Sonoma means grabbing a handbasket and passing through a square metal portal that opens into 24 acres of fruit, vegetable, herb and flower gardens, ready to pick your own produce. You might snag strawberries or clip purple asparagus, or ask a staff gardener for advice on what and how to harvest. Then you take your haul home, or eat it, fresh, in one of a few designated sitting areas.

Billed as an “edible garden adventure,” the pick-your-own-produce activity is the centerpiece of Noci, which isn’t a farm so much as a members-only garden. It shares some DNA with Community Supported Agriculture programs, except dues-paying members visit and harvest rather than wait for deliveries, and Noci emphasizes the ambience as much as the produce.

“We have this sincere desire to live in a garden,” says Chris Adjani, one half of the husband-and-wife team behind Noci. “To hang out with friends, explore nature, to have a place for the kids to run free, to gather organic fruits and vegetables from the fields, walls and trees all around us and mainly be able to cook a meal right there in the garden. If we wanted this lifestyle, we thought others might as well.”

Chris, who worked as a Web designer, moved in 2014 into a house in Healdsburg from Los Angeles with his wife, actor and chef Aria Alpert Adjani, and their two children. That same year, they bought the property that became Noci in nearby Dry Creek Valley, intending to build their family home there. After procuring a tractor and clearing the land, the couple began envisioning a new kind of family farmstead.

“We want you to go and have an experience and taste things you’d never taste, and put in your basket whatever you want,” says Aria. “We’re taking that farm to table one step further.”

The Noci model is unique, though not entirely without precedent. Traditional CSA programs are adapting to the emergence of industrial-scale organic farming and the broader shift among grocery stores toward local or semi-local produce.

Nearby, Green Valley Community Farm, which opened in Sebastopol in 2017 as a CSA, has begun hosting events and a members-only harvest. Veggielution in San Jose relies on community volunteers, with produce going to program participants and local residents. Live Power Community Farm, one of California’s oldest CSAs, advocates for a farm economy based on members’ input on business operations.

“People are really asking, how can they vote with their dollars, and the food system is responding with these options that support the kind of farms that we want to see in our community,” says Evan Wiig, founder of The Farmers Guild, a California membership organization that merged last year with the Community Alliance with Family Farmers. (Noci Sonoma is not a member.) “One of them is that true community connection, and that’s inviting people on to the farm, allowing them to take part and be participatory in their food consumption.”

Noci has arrived at that conclusion after several years of trial and error. The garden used to contain livestock, and in 2016 and 2017, 150 members bought access to a smaller garden at the back of the property.

Today, Noci’s open, riparian land is starting to take form. There are flower and vegetable beds, foot paths and a 400-foot-wide pond. Trellises are hung with fast-growing pink jasmine, thornless blackberries and grapevines. A few small buildings are in various stages of construction.

Noci will begin accepting memberships in June. Up to 300 members will each pay a $450 monthly fee for access and a share of food.

Later this year, the Adjanis hope to offer weddings, group dinners and seasonal workshops focused on families and cooking to members. Out front, a small retail operation called Noci Provisions will sell products from the garden and other local producers to members and non-members alike. Over the next couple of years, the Adjanis hope to add an office, kitchen space, classrooms and a root cellar, and even the family home they once envisioned.

“We don’t want to create a Disneyland garden,” says Aria. “We want to keep it as intimate as possible.”

Nathan Hurst is a freelance writer in San Francisco covering science, technology and travel. Email: travel@sfchronicle.com.