What you're describing is normal behavior for the camera. The thing is that the sky is way too bright compared to the foreground and no camera can capture such a big difference in tones, so you either:
1. Expose for the sky: which as in your 1st photo gives you a nice sky but turns the rest dark, or
2. Expose for the grass: which as your 2nd photo shows, gives you a nicely rendered foreground (grass, tree, street) but blows out the sky (it goes too white)
In the case above, you can either do a HDR image or just try again when there is better light. Maybe around sunrise or sundown the overall scene will be more evenly lit, giving you a nicer picture.
I suggest you read up on exposure metering to understand what the camera is doing, as there are different modes in the camera that read the scene differently.
There's a fairly easy to understand explanation on shutterstation.com here.