I'm a bit confused by your post, but I'll try to answer as best as possible. If you're talking about the leaves that fall from your trees in the fall, just leave them on your beds. They'll add an additional layer of protection/nutrition to your bed. If you're talking about the leaves that have been on your beds over the winter, I lightly rake them up as best as possible, then throw them on the compost pile. The rest I just pull out by hand (use my hand as a rake).

I'll try to explain this better. We get about 30-40 bags worth of leaves in the fall. Right now, my property is mostly sand, so raking or blowing is easy enough. But once we get the lanscaping completed, I'd like to have mulch in quite a few areas. So my concern is how to get all these leaves picked up off the mulch. What would be best choice of mulch, and method to clean up the leaves?

Most of us on this forum would do what Stephanie said:
leave those leaves on there.
They *are* mulch (insulation).

Removing them would do nothing for your garden/landscaping, but if you still want them gone, just rake them up with a leaf rake & put them into the compost pile/bin.

Bagging leaves & sending them to the landfill is a waste of time, materials (& materials cost money to replace!), & landfill space.

Leaves are wonderful for composting & for mulching/insulating.

I rake leaves out of beds, then hit them with a bagging mower and either put them back on the beds, or compost them. They're great mulch. If you want the bark mulck look- put the leaves on, then a little bark mulch on top. You'll need to buy less mulch, and the leaves will do a lot for your soil as they break down in place.

Thank you...I'm definitely a proponent of keeping leaves out of landfills...as much as one can, anyway.

I rake them up and mulch mower them like pablo said. The mulched leaves stay where you put them, whereas whole leaves tend to blow around. And, of course, the mulched leaves break down faster (but admittedly it's a lot of work).

Why bother with wood mulch, leaf mulch looks fine. It's not hard to rake up the whole leaves off the top of the leaf mulch, who cares if you get some mulch along with the leaves as long as you're putting it back in the same place?

As you can see, we consider the leaves you already have mulch. I collect other people's bagged leaves left at their curb for garbage pickup in the fall. But I prefer the look of shredded leaf mulch anyway. Then other fallen leaves and debris will blend in nicely. It looks more natural and is easier too.

I used to blow all my leaves into the mulch so it all looked the same. Now I blow the leaves off of the street and mulch back into my turf so I can mulch mow them into dust directly back into the grass.

At this stage, nothing has been laid down. So we want to get this right from the start."

If you use hardwood mulch the leaves will blend in and decompose leaving a natural appearance unless you want to work hard for some particular look. Running a lawn mower over them in the fall will cause them to decompose faster (increased surface area) in the spring.