For those of us in the south we deal with pine trees and dropping pine straw. My problem is that I have an area with two old pine trees and I constantly have pine straw dropping in my nice dark brown mulch. I just dumped a lot of brown mulch this spring and now it just looks spotty.

I hate the look of loose pine straw beds so I wanted to know if anyone ever used more natural looking mulch and if that "hid" the pine straw so it didn't look so out of place, or any other recommendations. I tried using the leaf blower but the straw just got tangled in the mulch and then everything started blowing, it wasn't good.