**3. Results and discussion**

#### **3.1 Seed sterilisation: Studying the effectiveness of various sterilisation methods**

Results were obtained for the four sterilisation methods after 14 days of cultivating seeds of Stevia, Bee balm, Chicory, and *Rhodiola krylovii*, and the values were presented using tables and bar charts (see **Table 2**).

#### *3.1.1 Method a*

The result of method A as shown in **Figure 1**, Stevia cells had 53.9% contamination, which was the least contaminated. While Bee balm, Chicory, and *Rhodiola krylovii* had


**Table 2.** *Effectiveness of various sterilisation methods (A, B, C and D).*

**Figure 1.** *Chart showing percentage contamination of method A.*

100%, 92.3%, and 100%, 92.3%, and 100% contamination, respectively. The result shows that this method is averagely suitable for Stevia seeds but not suitable for Bee balm, Chicory, and Rhodiola krylovii seeds. The sterilisation method is not effective for all the seeds since the level of percentage contamination is high, and the agar composition in this 05 method was 0.8 g.
