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Walking around Grosvenor Market, the compact grocery he owns beneath the Grosvenor Park apartments in North Bethesda, Scot Shuck takes a veritable tour of Maryland.

Over here, he says, green tomatoes from Dickerson. Over there, yellow peppers from Sabillasville. On the shelf, marinara sauce from Frederick, hung with a sign proclaiming Shuck uses it at his own Garrett Park home.

With the convergence of the recession and public interest in living greenly, locally-produced goods are becoming more of a priority for merchants like Shuck, who see them as a way to get ahead of "the big guys" who can't always get the shipment of product they need from the small producers.

"We've always sold local products and produce but every year people are more and more into it," Shuck said. "Everyone's thinking about freshness, everyone's thinking about green, and we want to help out our local people. We're all in this together, if they do well, we do well."

Shuck is among many small businesses in Montgomery County turning to fellow entrepreneurs for support in the recession, finding that when they band together, business can be better.

Susan Soorenko, owner of Silver Spring-based Moorenko Ice Cream, said the company only began focusing on wholesale marketing to small neighborhood shops like Shuck's in the past few weeks. Sales were down at the retail ice cream stores, Soorenko said, and she even closed her McLean, Va., location after it struggled in the recession, turning to wholesale as the way out of the hole.

Moorenko's Ice Cream has been at Grosvenor Market for about two weeks now, she said, and though dealing with little guys means more time involvement than is required for her shipments to larger chains like Whole Foods, Soorenko said she gains much from the expansion.

"It's almost more intimate, because you're kind of in a partnership with them. It's very rewarding, certainly, emotionally," Soorenko said, and she thinks her wholesale expansion will be financially rewarding as well.

"The people who patronize those markets are extremely loyal, extremely loyal, and have a huge sense of ownership of their market," Soorenko said. "So if you're there in their market you have become part of their family."

One such loyal customer of the Grosvenor Market is Melanie Miller, who said she sometimes makes four trips a day downstairs to the store. Shuck said some customers have taken to calling it "my pantry" because of their frequent visits.

Miller said fresh and local goods are important to her, part of the reason she likes Shuck's shop so much.

"Anything fresh on the side of the road I'll buy," she said, both for ecological and health reasons. "I don't buy produce from anyone in Washington except for (Shuck). I don't buy it from Giant, I don't buy it from anywhere else."

Lewis Orchards in Dickerson has been in Robert Lewis's family since 1888. He said small markets like Shuck and roadside produce vendors are his primary customers, because they're more willing to give him a fair price than large grocery chains.

"With these local guys I'm selling to, we pretty much set a price. All year long, that's where we'll stay," Lewis said. With larger chains, he said, it's harder to get a price commitment and harder to produce the amount of inventory needed.

Shuck said he can also take the time to make phone calls with the farmers and train his stockers to handle the tomatoes a certain way.

"Big scale makes it harder to be gentle with things like homegrown tomatoes, and I mean, they almost bruise when you look at them," Shuck said.

Shuck said small businesses are more willing to work with each other's foibles, such as the shipment of ice cream he got from Soorenko that had "Amaretto" handwritten in the flavor slot because something had gone awry with the labeling.

"I don't mind that," Shuck said. "I think the big guys might."

Soorenko said she has found that the recession has made "more precious" the value of things beyond their price tag, and small businesses can count on each other more.

"If anything good comes out of difficult times, we start looking closer to home, we start holding relationships to a higher value, and we become a little more open hearted with the people we work with," she said.