What I mean is: When you dump out your containers for the season, what do you look for?

I dumped out my pepper/basil pot, my nasturtium pot, and midget melon pot today. The pepper was rootbound and now I know it either needs a bigger pot or not to share the pot with basil as I suspect they choked each other out. (The basil got almost as big as the pepper plant!)
The nasturtium was crowded out by clover and grass :( All my weeding was for naught. The grass roots weren't deep but they were alllllllll over the pot. The melon pot was mostly empty. The soil looked good, I think. The soil was dark & there was still growing space but the roots were realllllly thin. Maybe that is why there were only two melons that survived? Did the assault of the cucumber beetles have anything to do with their spindliness or is that a characteristic of melon roots?
Great thing? NONE of these pots had earwigs like my squash earlier this summer or any other yuckies (spiders between the water tray and the pot don't count).

So, what do you look for when you dump your containers?