Material using vertex colors with texture overlay

So I´ve read some articles about assigning UV-Coordinates to vertices when generating a mesh. Our terrain is split into a grid with multiple terrain tiles. So each of those tiles is holding a mesh, but the problem is that one grid may contain a border between two biomes (like snow and grass biome).
But I can only attach one material to this tile, but I don´t want the whole tile to have the same texture pattern (it should be a grass pattern for the grass biome and a snowy pattern for the snow biome). So I have two options, either have a big texture which contains all the different available landscape pattern textures OR make sure that every terrain tile only consists of one biome type.

I haven´t done anything like that before, so what might be the better solution? And what are the maximum dimensions for such a texture?