This Is My Land!

I now am a owner of DIRT!!! I know that must sound really funny but I am excited about it all the same. We have never lived in a place were we were able to plant stuff outside. Like, yeah, we could plant stuff in flower pots but the pots would have to stay inside of the house. I can actually put stuff in the ground here. The yard was a bit of a mess when we moved in. A lot of the grass is dead because of the pine tree needles that are killing it. I hope that one day we will be able to get the grass to come back but we will just have to wait and see about that. The outside of our apartment is really covered in the shade so I will have to be careful of the things that I plant in our yard. Only a small part of our yard gets some sun and it is not for very long. It also gets really hot here and the temperature can go up and down 40 degrees in a day. The hottest that I have heard of it getting is like 110 degrees for a month and a half. So that is another thing that I will have to be careful of when planting. So if any of you have any ideas on plants that could handle that kind of situation let me know. I am not much of a green thumb, really it is more black when it comes to plants. For those of you that want to see what the outside looks like and to help you get better landscaping ideas for me here it is.Here is our little patio area that we can put stuff out on. We also can plant in that little rectangle indent that you see and in front of the patio fence too.Here is a view from the front door out. It also lets you see the other side of the fence on the patio. This is the spot where we do get some sun. Isn't it funny that we don't get sun on the dirt much at all but on the fence?Here you can see how much we can plant in the front of that fence to the other apartment window wall.Now you can really see just how much grass we do not have because of that pine tree. I sure do hope that I can get it to grow back. Our neighbors have the same problem with their yard too but it is no where near as bad as ours.We also get to plant under our front windows. The hard thing about this spot is that there are a ton of rocks in the ground and they are big ones that are going to take some time to get out. Another problem is that we have a lot of tree roots to get out as well so that we can use the ground.Another fun thing about our spot is that along the side of the other apartment we can plant whatever we want too. So we have a ton of dirt areas to plant but like the others this also just gets shade. So let me know if you can think of anything because I could really use the help.