recursive sftp

Hello,

I need to sftp to an account on a remote system where I have lots of stuff stored and retrieve the whole directory. I cannot manually retrieve every file as it would take forever. I also cannot mirror because it's not exactly a publicly available system, it's just a private account. I would like to inquire about whether it is possible to use an sftp like tool that will retrieve everything recursively, preferably over a secure shell connection (port 22).

Thanks,

wget would be nice, but I don't see anything in the manual about secure connections. Why not just tar and gzip everything, transfer that one big file with sftp, gunzip and untar on the other end?