All thats needed is for a gender changing cable to put together, I found a cable with a USB socket on one end and spliced this with a cable with a miniusb plug, now its possible to plug the memory card in to the socket and the miniusb plug into the gumstix. Softwarewise it works immediately, the stock image has the usb mass storage modules, all i needed to do was run the command:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbdisk