Chunking Example
This page walks through exactly what the search index sees when a source page is chunked. The source is a short gardening guide — nothing Vecto-specific — so you can focus on how the text is sliced up without getting distracted by the content.
For the config options that control this behavior, see Content chunking on the main Docusaurus Search page.
Source page
---
title: Growing Tomatoes at Home
---
Tomatoes are one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow in a backyard garden. With a sunny spot, consistent watering, and the right variety for your climate, a single plant can produce fruit from early summer through the first frost.
This guide covers how to pick a variety, when and where to plant seedlings, and how to tell when fruit is ready to harvest.
## Choosing a variety
There are hundreds of tomato varieties, but most fall into a few broad categories based on fruit size and growth habit. The right choice depends on how much space you have and what you plan to do with the fruit.
### Cherry tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes produce lots of small, sweet fruit on sprawling plants that keep bearing until frost. They are the most forgiving choice for beginners and tolerate imperfect watering better than larger varieties.
### Beefsteak tomatoes
Beefsteak tomatoes grow large, meaty fruit ideal for slicing onto sandwiches or burgers. They take longer to ripen and need steady water and sturdy support, but a single ripe beefsteak can weigh over a pound.
## Planting
Timing and location matter more than almost any other decision you'll make. Get these right and the rest of the season mostly takes care of itself.
### When to plant
Plant seedlings outside two weeks after the last frost, once nighttime temperatures stay above fifty degrees. Planting earlier risks stunting the plants, which rarely fully recover even after the weather warms.
### Where to plant
Choose a spot that gets at least six hours of direct sun and has well-drained soil. Avoid low corners of the yard where water pools after rain, and rotate to a different bed each year to reduce disease.
## Harvesting
Pick fruit when it is fully colored and gives slightly to a gentle squeeze. Tomatoes continue to ripen off the vine, so if a cold snap threatens the last green fruit, bring them inside to finish on a sunny windowsill.
Chunks produced
The tabs below show the exact text of every chunk that gets indexed under each splitOnHeadings value. Each chunk carries a heading metadata field (shown as the tab-internal label) and a text field (shown in the code block) that starts with the chunk's breadcrumb — the full chain of ancestor headings from the page title down to the chunk's own heading — followed by the section body. Markdown structure is preserved; MDX-specific constructs (imports, JSX tags, expression braces) are stripped.
The breadcrumb matters because it gives every chunk its full hierarchical context. A deep #### chunk with a leaf heading like "Overview" or "Configuration" would be ambiguous in isolation, but with the breadcrumb it reads "# Page › ## Parent › ### Grandparent › #### Overview" — enough for the ranker and for any LLM reading the chunk as retrieval context to know exactly where it sits in the doc.
- splitOnHeadings: [2, 4] (default)
- splitOnHeadings: [2, 2] (H2 only)
Splits on ## and ###, producing 8 chunks — one per section.
Chunk 1 · heading Growing Tomatoes at Home
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
Tomatoes are one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow in a backyard garden. With a sunny spot, consistent watering, and the right variety for your climate, a single plant can produce fruit from early summer through the first frost.
This guide covers how to pick a variety, when and where to plant seedlings, and how to tell when fruit is ready to harvest.
Chunk 2 · heading Choosing a variety
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Choosing a variety
There are hundreds of tomato varieties, but most fall into a few broad categories based on fruit size and growth habit. The right choice depends on how much space you have and what you plan to do with the fruit.
Chunk 3 · heading Cherry tomatoes
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Choosing a variety
### Cherry tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes produce lots of small, sweet fruit on sprawling plants that keep bearing until frost. They are the most forgiving choice for beginners and tolerate imperfect watering better than larger varieties.
Chunk 4 · heading Beefsteak tomatoes
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Choosing a variety
### Beefsteak tomatoes
Beefsteak tomatoes grow large, meaty fruit ideal for slicing onto sandwiches or burgers. They take longer to ripen and need steady water and sturdy support, but a single ripe beefsteak can weigh over a pound.
Chunk 5 · heading Planting
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Planting
Timing and location matter more than almost any other decision you'll make. Get these right and the rest of the season mostly takes care of itself.
Chunk 6 · heading When to plant
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Planting
### When to plant
Plant seedlings outside two weeks after the last frost, once nighttime temperatures stay above fifty degrees. Planting earlier risks stunting the plants, which rarely fully recover even after the weather warms.
Chunk 7 · heading Where to plant
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Planting
### Where to plant
Choose a spot that gets at least six hours of direct sun and has well-drained soil. Avoid low corners of the yard where water pools after rain, and rotate to a different bed each year to reduce disease.
Chunk 8 · heading Harvesting
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Harvesting
Pick fruit when it is fully colored and gives slightly to a gentle squeeze. Tomatoes continue to ripen off the vine, so if a cold snap threatens the last green fruit, bring them inside to finish on a sunny windowsill.
Notice how sibling chunks (e.g. ### Cherry tomatoes and ### Beefsteak tomatoes) share the first two breadcrumb lines and diverge only on the last — the ranker sees both "cherry" and "beefsteak" co-locate with "tomato varieties" even though the page title doesn't contain "varieties".
A search for "which tomato is best for a beginner" lands on chunk 3. The chunk's text contains "tomato" (twice — in the breadcrumb and in the leaf heading), "cherry" (in the leaf heading), and "beginners" (in the body), giving BM25 strong keyword overlap with the query. The result card shows Growing Tomatoes at Home › Cherry tomatoes.
Splits on ## only. The ### subsections are not boundaries — their full ### heading lines and bodies flow into the enclosing ## chunk, and they do not appear in the breadcrumb because they never became chunk boundaries. Total: 4 chunks.
Chunk 1 · heading Growing Tomatoes at Home
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
Tomatoes are one of the most rewarding vegetables to grow in a backyard garden. With a sunny spot, consistent watering, and the right variety for your climate, a single plant can produce fruit from early summer through the first frost.
This guide covers how to pick a variety, when and where to plant seedlings, and how to tell when fruit is ready to harvest.
Chunk 2 · heading Choosing a variety
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Choosing a variety
There are hundreds of tomato varieties, but most fall into a few broad categories based on fruit size and growth habit. The right choice depends on how much space you have and what you plan to do with the fruit.
### Cherry tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes produce lots of small, sweet fruit on sprawling plants that keep bearing until frost. They are the most forgiving choice for beginners and tolerate imperfect watering better than larger varieties.
### Beefsteak tomatoes
Beefsteak tomatoes grow large, meaty fruit ideal for slicing onto sandwiches or burgers. They take longer to ripen and need steady water and sturdy support, but a single ripe beefsteak can weigh over a pound.
Chunk 3 · heading Planting
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Planting
Timing and location matter more than almost any other decision you'll make. Get these right and the rest of the season mostly takes care of itself.
### When to plant
Plant seedlings outside two weeks after the last frost, once nighttime temperatures stay above fifty degrees. Planting earlier risks stunting the plants, which rarely fully recover even after the weather warms.
### Where to plant
Choose a spot that gets at least six hours of direct sun and has well-drained soil. Avoid low corners of the yard where water pools after rain, and rotate to a different bed each year to reduce disease.
Chunk 4 · heading Harvesting
# Growing Tomatoes at Home
## Harvesting
Pick fruit when it is fully colored and gives slightly to a gentle squeeze. Tomatoes continue to ripen off the vine, so if a cold snap threatens the last green fruit, bring them inside to finish on a sunny windowsill.
The ### subheadings inside chunks 2 and 3 are preserved verbatim in the body — their markers and text both stay — but they are not part of the chunk's breadcrumb because they never triggered a chunk boundary. They also aren't promoted to the chunk's heading metadata field; a query for "when to plant tomatoes" returns chunk 3 with the result card showing Growing Tomatoes at Home › Planting, not › When to plant.
The coarser layout favors queries that need to weigh multiple subsections together — "what's the difference between cherry and beefsteak tomatoes" now has both varieties' prose in one chunk, so both terms contribute to a single document's score. It hurts queries that want to land on one specific subsection.
What about chunkSize?
Every section in the source above is short — well under the default chunkSize: 500 words — so the word-window splitter never kicks in and each heading section produces exactly one chunk. If a section were longer than chunkSize words, it would be further sliced into overlapping windows of chunkSize words with chunkOverlap words overlap between adjacent windows. Each window carries the same heading and a different partIndex suffix in its chunk ID.
In other words: splitOnHeadings decides where chunks begin, and chunkSize/chunkOverlap decide whether any individual chunk is too large and needs to be further subdivided.