I live in a highly populated suburban area and I have noticed a lot of my neighbors have large fruit trees.
We live in the land of plenty, so I know a lot of the fruit goes to waste (i.e. never gets picked). Very few people know anything about canning, dehydrating, etc. around here. In fact, when I was really young, we lived in a house that had a HUGE orange tree in the back yard, and we almost never ate oranges so nearly 100% of the fruit got wasted/fell to the ground.
I couple weeks ago I decided to start a "free fruit exchange" where if any of my neighbors had trees that produce more fruit than they can handle, they can call me and I'll come pick the fruit, then distribute it out to other fruit tree owners (and myself, of course). I created a very basic/personal flyer, hand-wrote "Thank you!" on them, and dropped 7 of the flyers off at neighboring houses.
..no responses thus far.
(Btw, by "dropping off flyers" I mean slowly sneaking up to their door, then if I hear noise inside, I fling the folded up paper at their front door and run away like a little girl. I'm really shy and don't want to disturb them as we get a lot of door-to-door salespeople in this area)
One of the houses that didn't respond to my flyer has a kumquat tree in their front yard that's begun dropping fruit (after I dropped off the flyer). So, I ask myself, why didn't they call?
My assumption is that I probably need to knock on doors and speak to the neighbors (strangers to me) personally. They're a lot less likely to be comfortable with wasting fruit when they're saying no to a person rather than a flyer (and they'll be more confident that they'll get the benefit of other peoples' fruit trees as well!).
So my question: How the hell do I muster up the courage to knock on doors? Do you have any tips?
Please note: I'm an EXTREME introvert and hate disturbing people's family time, but I can only knock on doors on weekdays after 5:30pm and on weekends. Also, historically, when I have tried other things that require me to go out of my bubble, one bad experience can scare me away permanently. Eek. Advice?