Dream Garden: Apeni, Kakheti
Blog
One thing I managed to accomplish during my week in Kakheti was visiting an old friend of mine and my wife’s, widowed a year or so now and moving on. His daughter and her young son live with him, and his other daughter and her family were also visiting from Germany, so it was a great catch-up time with these people I’ve known my entire long time in Georgia.
Murtazi, formerly assisted by his wife, has the most orderly garden I’ve seen anywhere in this country, and it’s his main source of income. Here you can find seedlings for so many different kinds of fruit and flowers that you’d be hard pressed to choose. And not only the common varieties found in Georgia, but some which he imports as exotics, multiplies, and sells. Whether it’s a single specimen you’re after or want to start your own entire orchard, he can accommodate you.
He gave us some peach seedlings which we are nursing carefully up in our high, cold mountains, and they’ve come through a winter intact indoors. Little birds-eye chili peppers are another attempt of ours to bring something unusual up here, and these too need coddling through the cold months; but they hang on, and as long as they get enough sunshine (essential for peppers), they can become the base for all sorts of blistering sauces.
Persimmons… plums… pears… apples… He doesn’t focus on grapes, letting others do this in the region which has the most varieties of them in Georgia already, many of them ancient. It’s the other fruits and vegetables, rarer and harder to find, in which he specializes. Decorative cabbages with impossibly crinkly fractal edges threatening to spill out from the second or even third dimension onto a higher, three-point-something one, glow with delicate cream and mauve to purple hues. Herbs and spices too, to liven up your cooking. We spent a while hulling fallen walnuts from their softer outer shells, under a massive decades-old tree which beckoned me to climb high into it.
And it’s all so organized, neat and tidy, that you can put your finger on anything at a glance, among the rows and rectangles. Irrigation hoses snake their way around too, to make life that much easier when everything needs watering, each by its own amount and schedule. Murtazi can turn on the water just where he needs it, and hold it back elsewhere, with everything perfectly controlled. The hot Kakheti sun does the rest, along with careful attention against insects which could wreak havoc. Shoppers come from across Georgia to see, sample and take away just what they were looking for or perhaps didn’t even know they lacked. It’s a feast for the eyes, nose and mouth.
This is the kind of business to which I can only wish great success, because it deserves it. There are hours and years of hard work in evidence here, and profound knowledge of what it takes to help so many different plants flourish. He has done the work so that we can simply show up, browse, and buy whatever we need for our own gardens or kitchens or tables, wherever. He’ll let you know the specific conditions which are best for whatever you choose, or simply advise you on caring for whatever you might already have. May his labor continue to support himself and his family, and continue also to spread beauty and good taste right across Georgia.
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 1900 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri:
www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
By Tony Hanmer