$7 for an avocado? Harvesting shortage hits Sydney prices

• The smashed avocado price crisis hits Melbourne
• The truth behind the avocado shortage: growers made 'innocent mistake'

Sydney's real-estate obsession has been benched as we're now fixated with the rising price of avocados.

The latest spike has seen a Sydney ABC radio listener quoting $7 for a single fruit in Mosman. At Harris Farm in Broadway, prices start from $5 for a small avocado and reach $7 for a large Reed variety.

This is only good news for people who have smashed avocado on toast fatigue, but tragic for anyone who with a strong avocado dependency. It is a pretty great sandwich-bolstering staple, after all.

So what has triggered this price shock?

Generally, avocado supplies are lower in summer and shipments from New Zealand help balance this out. However, harvesting was scaled back over Christmas, and with weeks of wet weather in Western Australia and New Zealand further slowing things down, avocado stocks have taken a vital hit.

"We prefer to see a balanced market and in time, prices will start to ease as more fruit comes onto the market," John Tyas, chief executive of Avocados Australia, says. "We should be back to more normal pricing in March/April.

"Western Australia and New Zealand will continue their harvest over the next few weeks and then the Atherton Tablelands will start harvesting around late February, so prices are likely to ease a bit," he says. "We wouldn't expect retail prices to go much higher, but the bottom line is it depends on the demand and supply relationship.

"It is worth noting that this is not like the banana crisis when the cyclones wiped out the banana crops – we still have avocados coming through, just a bit fewer and slower."

Hopefully this means $7 avocados will not become the new normal. In the meantime, people with avo trees in their backyard have become exponentially popular overnight. Befriend one if you can.