Washougals approach would work fine too, I'm sure there are some beautiful plants in that garden. However since it's your first grow (and your only genetics atm), I think flowering a clone or 2 is a good choice. If you flower the mother, then you have to wait for your clones to get big enough to clone again. If you keep the mother in veg, chances are you'll get more cuts faster and get your perpetual garden going.

That being said, I'm not a big fan of keeping single mother plants. They take up room, resources, and when branches on the mother grow older and become "barky" they become harder to root. They often require much larger containers than the rest of the garden as well. Just my personal take on it though, mothers have been used successfully for years.

If you clone generationally so to speak, that's cloning off your vegging clones right before you flower them you can accomplish a few things at once. You take care of lollipopping the bottom branches of the girls headed into flower (where most wasteful bud production occurs, also known to be where quickest rooting cuts are found on the plant), and you keep a supply of hearty fresh cuts going.

Iry