Hannah Bail is busy. Her first words to me are a breathless apology for sticking me with the job of picking up the apples that have fallen from the overladen trees.

“It’s just been one damn thing after the next,” she explains in the robust accent of her native Germany. She has large, clear eyes and the kind of flawless, rosy complexion you’d expect of someone who has spent most of her 38 years working on farms. “We usually try to do it every afternoon but just couldn’t do it the last three days.”

The job is important, she says, because keeping rotting apples out from under the trees is one of the keys to producing apples without pesticides. “Everyone says you can’t grow organic apples. B.S. But orchard hygiene is very, very, very important to us.”

The apples at Threshold Farm in Philmont, NY, where Bail and her husband Hugh Williams have cultivated an orchard for the last 13 years, are certainly organic by anyone’s measure, though they can’t legally label them that. The organic certification requires recordkeeping they don’t have time for and fees they cannot afford. Instead, they label their apples with an older, and stranger, designation: biodynamic, a method of growing based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, educator and esotericist best known for founding Waldorf education.

I dragged my boyfriend up to this farm in the Hudson Valley to pick half-rotten apples from piles of deer droppings because I wanted to see what this strange word, biodynamic, really meant. I ran across it for the first time when some Threshold Farm apples ended up at my neighborhood Community Supported Agriculture drop-off, Eat Records in Greenpoint. The staff at the store explained biodynamic as being “beyond organic” with a twist of pagan voodoo. There were sustainable growing practices, yes, along with a bit of howling at the moon.

This image could not have been farther from what we encountered upon arriving at the 45-acre hilltop farm. A freakishly warm October was finally settling into something that resembled fall. A dozen rather well-adjusted-looking people in fleece jackets and stocking caps milled about the top of the orchard, some on ladders, some crouching next to plastic bins, as children ran around shrieking with laughter. Bail moved methodically from group to group, engaging in some political chatter as she gently showed her volunteers how to tell when an apple is ready to pick or where to drag the bulging bags so that Williams could pick them up on the tractor.

Most had driven an hour up from Beacon, NY, or beyond to support the farm, pass a pastoral afternoon, and drive home with cars stuffed with exquisitely fresh apples and vegetables that simply tasted better than anything else around.